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V \ v 











THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


Books by E. Temple Thurston 

The Passionate Crime 

Achievement 

Richard Furlong 

The Antagonists 

The Open Window 

The City of Beautiful Nonsense 

The Apple of Eden 

Traffic 

The Realist 

The Evolution of Katherine 

Mirage 

Sally Bishop 

The Greatest Wish in the World 
The Patchwork Papers 
The Garden of Resurrection 
The Flower of Gloster 
Thirteen 


ISO A 



THE 

PASSIONATE CRIME 

A TALE OF FAERIE 


BY 

E. TEMPLE THURSTON 

AUTHOR OP “ACHIEVEMENT,^ “RICHARD FURLONG,” 
"THE ANTAGONISTS,” “THE OPEN WINDOW,” ETC. 



D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
NEW YORK 1915 





Copyright, 1915. by 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 


2 . y 5 6 

v / 4 



Printed in the United States of America 


TO DION B 0 UC 1 CAULT 


My dear Boucicault, 

You have shown such a kind interest in this story for the 
drama — such as it may he — which it contains, that I, long 
ago , made up my mind to ask you to accept its dedication 
when it came before the public in the garments of a book . 

It still remains for me to dress it as a play and when that 
comes to pass, I hope you will still approve of the tailor 
who is indebted to you for the custom of much kindness . 

Yours sincerely , 

E. Temple Thurston . 


Gellibrands, 1915. 






THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


PART I 

CHAPTER I 

W HO, if any, I wonder, knows the true his- 
tory of Anthony Sorel and Anna Quar- 
termaine? Do I really know it myself? 
Some of that which I heard was told me by an 
old woman up in the mountains near Clogheen. This 
was not so many miles from where they took An- 
thony Sorel, therefore I persuaded myself that she 
would be as likely as any to have the truth. More- 
over there was something in the telling of it, some- 
thing in the atmosphere that surrounded her in her 
lonely cottage on that wild mountainside — you 
must know well what I mean — which brought con- 
viction to me. 

This little hovel of hers stood in the scant shelter 
of a cluster of mountain ash, only a few hundred 
yards from the road that winds its silent and lonely 
way through a pass of the hills. 

Down that pass, the whole winter long the wind 
drives the beaten rain, an endless herd of raindrops, 
swelling the brown mountain streams as they froth 
i 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


and fume over the bowlders. For ever they are 
making cascades and waterfalls, these little streams. 
Sometimes the mountain land offers them a hollow 
wherein they swirl into an eddying pool. They look 
so deep those pools. A mountain pool, a mountain 
lake — who would not believe in faeries, standing 
by the edge of one of these ! 

This was where the old woman lived who told 
me the story of Anthony Sorel and Anna Quarter- 
maine. She knew everything, this old woman. It 
was as though, in that miserable hovel of hers, 
many and many a mile from any place of habitation, 
it was as though she heard, by some miracle, all the 
gossip of the big world. I felt she knew far more 
than she wished to tell. From whom did she get 
her knowledge? That road from Clogheen across 
the mountains, seems the loneliest road in the world. 
For miles along its uneven surface, you may walk 
and walk seeing never a soul, or just a herdsman 
perhaps, driving his cattle to a distant farm. 

Yet I suppose the whole of the world, the world 
of those parts, goes by that way. There is no other 
road I know of bearing to the south. And I can 
well imagine the rush of joy that leaps up in the 
heart of a traveler when, out of the lashing sheets 
of mist and rain, he sees through the gray dark- 
ness, the candle glimmering in her tiny window. 

Why do I say “imagine”? I know well, without 
a call upon my fancy, the joy I felt when first I saw 
that candle-light. 

Coming from Clogheen and nine long miles along 
2 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

the road, with five and more still stretched before 
me, I found the mist of the rain beating with pin 
pricks on my face. It was difficult to keep my eyes 
open. My clothes were drenched, the water drip- 
ping in collected drops from the edges of my sleeves 
and slowly draining from the sodden collar of my 
coat. In the dim light, I could see the mountain 
sheep, clinging under the shelter of the rocks, their 
backs turned to the driving wind. 

How many more miles? What hour of night 
could I hope to reach my destination? My pace 
had fallen to three miles an hour. How many more 
miles? And then that little orange chink of light 
through the ash trees — the sight of the glimmering 
window — still more the quiver of trembling light 
within that told its promise of a cheerful fire of 
wood and peat. That rush of joy, I felt then. 

I stepped off the road, staggering and stumbling 
through the sodden marsh land. The water soaked 
into my boots with squelching noises that seemed 
to suck the last warm drop of blood out of my veins. 

I knocked at the door and heard a grunt within 
— a human grunt that spoke in volumes of a deep 
suspicion. Would she open to me? Would I open 
to the first sound of a knock upon the door on such 
a night, if I lived in those lonely mountains? 

All fell silent and I knocked again. 

Then I heard footsteps shuffling within — still a 
suspicious sound, giving me no assurance of the 
welcome that I needed. They slowly approached 
the door. With the slow unbolting of a latch, it 
3 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


was opened an inch. The wind seized it and against 
her body blew it open still further. There was the 
old woman. Like an animal’s, accustomed to the 
light, her face peered out blindly into the darkness. 

“Can you give me shelter?” said I. 

She paused in curious inquisitiveness before she 
answered. 

“Shelter ?” I repeated. 

“Is it coming from Clogheen, ye are?” she asked 
gruffly. 

I said I was. 

“What a fool ye are,” said she — “wid the night 
on top av ye, an’ ye in yeer little coat.” 

I explained that it was a fine sunset when I started 
and did not promise for rain. But still she held the 
door against the wind and made no movement to 
suggest that she would take me in. 

“Now I’m drenched to the skin,” I went on — “I 
can’t get to Cappoquin to-night.” 

“There’d be a corpse to be buried if ye did,” said 
she, and either it was the slow relenting of her deter- 
mination or it was the wind, but the door yielded 
another inch against her body. 

“Could I just come in and dry my clothes by the 
fire?” I pleaded. “The rain may stop soon.” 

Perhaps it was my pitiable ignorance of the 
weather’s ways in this part of the world that made 
her fully relent, for at that she let the wind take the 
door and swing it wide upon its hinges. I hurried 
into the little room and she closed out the night 
behind me. 


4 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


It was a one-roomed cottage. There are so many 
in the wild parts of Ireland. The floor was of mud, 
caked and hard — dirty it is true — but warm and 
welcome enough then. The fire burned brightly on 
the floor under the open chimney — the glowing peat 
and crackling faggots were laid on two slabs of 
stone. They would long have burnt deep into the 
floor unless. 

Without seeming too curious, I looked around 
me. It must have been such a cottage as this in 
which Anthony Sorel had lived. There was just a 
bed, a table beneath the little window, a dresser of 
painted deal upon which more of the blue and white 
plates were broken than were whole. The lower 
cupboards of this dresser were barred with strips 
of wood, as a cage. There she kept her chickens. 
Sometimes to a noise in the room, they shifted on 
their perches, making raucous sounds as though 
annoyed at the disturbance. For the most part they 
were quiet company though, but none too clean. 
The floor was soiled with them. Even a chair that 
stood against the wall bore marks of their existence 
in the room. The old woman had long lost all sense 
of tidiness. 

Realizing the solitude of her life there alone, I 
scarcely wondered at it. It is the social instinct 
that tends to make us regard the cleanliness and 
well-seeming of the body. When we are surrounded 
by the loneliness of life, it is the mind we live with. 
Almost it is as though the body ceases to exist. This 
is much what Anthony Sorel believed. 

5 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


As soon as she had closed the door, the old 
woman pulled up the chair from against the wall 
and set it by the fire. The invitation for me to be 
seated was a silent one. When she sat down her- 
self on the three-legged stool near the bellows- 
wheel, I sat down on the chair. 

For the moment, while we were silent, I glanced 
at the bed. No better description of it can I give 
than by saying it was four-posted, yet it seemed 
to be built into the wall; to be part of the room 
itself. The bed-clothes were indescribable — dirty 
and disordered. The outer cover of the clothes 
might well have been a horse-blanket, but stained 
and long since indistinguishable from the thing 
it once had been. What clothes there were beneath 
it, I could not see. Indeed I felt I did not wish to 
know. 

But it was the odor of that room which first and 
most of all revolted me. I find it impossible to 
describe. So many scents were mingled there — the 
smell of peat, the burning wood, aromatic and 
delightful enough in themselves, but mixed with the 
smell of the chickens, the close atmosphere, my own 
damp clothes perhaps as well and God knows what 
odor from the old woman herself, they all combined 
to offend my nostrils and stifle the breath in my 
throat. It was like air out of which all the good- 
ness and the cleanliness had been breathed; it was 
heavy, tired, as the smell of flowers that have stood 
long dead in water no one ever changed. And there 
outside was the clean wind, leaving the scent of 
6 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


heather in a lingering suspension as it rushed along 
the mountainside. 

It is strange though how quickly one’s senses 
become accustomed to the things which just a con- 
trast makes unendurable. In a few moments, the 
warm atmosphere had taken the chill out of my 
blood and only the smell of the peat was conscious 
to my mind as I sat there. 

Outside the wind whistled and it howled. It flung 
the rain like grains of sand against the window-pane ; 
it rattled the door on its old hinges and threw the 
raindrops down the chimney, spitting into the fire. 
Never did it seem I had known such a night. 

I said as much, hoping to make conversation, for 
though in odd moments I could see the old woman 
was taking cunning glances at me, yet for the most 
part, she sat with her elbows on her knees, her face 
in her hands, staring into the fire. 

She looked up as though she pitied me when I 
spoke about the rain. 

“ ’Tis fine and soft,” said she and then, having 
once spoken, her curiosity got the better of her. She 
plied me with questions as to where I had come 
from, whence I was going; half ingenuous, half 
cunning questions as to who I was and what I was 
doing in that part of the world. 

I pulled a book out of the little parcel of things I 
was carrying and gave it into her hand. She just 
looked at it as though it were a strange thing, being 
no answer to her question and then returned it to 


me. 


7 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“An’ what’s that?” said she. 

“A book of poems — ” I replied. 

“An’ what’s the good o’ them to me and I can’t 
read,” said she. 

“Can’t read at all?” 

“There’s deuce a worrd I can read an’ ’tis over 
the shop windows, an’ painted out for me as large 
as meself. What’s poethry to me? What would I 
be doin’ readin’ in a place like this?” 

I wished to conceal my astonishment. What 
could she do in a place like that if she did not read? 

“Have you never heard any poetry at all?” I 
asked. 

“Oh — I have indeed,” she replied quickly — 
“Haven’t we a gleeman in these parts, an’ he as 
blind, he couldn’t find the door, till the wind blew 
in through the crack of ut.” 

I asked her if she liked poetry, to which she re- 
plied she did — “Well enough,” she added — “when 
there’s a lilt, ye could set yeer feet to ut.” 

I opened the book at random and I read out — 


“There is a wind that speeds across 
The mountain heather and the moss, 
And you alone will know the loss 
If it has never found you. 

It tunes the harp strings in the trees 
That play their muted minstrelsies 
Which fairies dance to on the leas, 
Around and all around you.” 

8 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


I had scarcely finished the last word before her 
elbows dropped off her knees and her eyes were 
dancing in the fire-light with excitement. 

“Shure, glory be!” she exclaimed — “wouldn’t I 
know that as well as I’d know my own name! 
Wasn’t ut up in the mountains here, away up there 
by Knockshunahallion, that Anthony Sorel drew all 
thim words down wid a lead pin on bits of paper.” 

A lead pin ! She meant with a pencil. But it was 
not the quaintness of this expression that caught my 
interest. She, who had never read a written word 
in her life, knew, at first hearing, the author of the 
verse I had read her! There was scarcely one in 
England who could have told me by whom those 
lines were written. 

There she lived in that part of the world, where 
the obscure fate of Anthony Sorel had woven its 
completion on the loom whereon all men’s lives are 
spun. Knockshunahallion, so I calculated, was only 
four or five miles away, but they were miles of 
wildest Irish mountain land, where there is scarce a 
man and never a woman who would walk them after 
sunset when once the night had fallen. 

Readily as her knowledge was to be accounted for, 
it surprised me nevertheless. For this was my mis- 
sion, to learn the truth of the story concerning An- 
thony Sorel and Anna Quartermaine. Not one in 
England could tell it me, beyond what had hap- 
pened to filter through from the Irish papers at the 
time. And that was well-nigh twenty years ago. A 
few there were who had heard his name. Still fewer 
9 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


knew that he was a poet. There was scarce one 
who had read his verse. 

His work, when all of it was collected, only made 
a small volume — that volume which I carried with 
me in the knapsack on my shoulder. It had been 
published by a man in Dublin who had been dead 
some years and the book itself had long since gone 
out of print. The volume which I possess, I picked 
up on a bookstall in London, before Aldwych and 
the Kingsway ever existed and Booksellers’ Row 
was that corner of the Romance of men’s thoughts 
which has long crumbled into the dust. 

First I read the book, strangely attracted to the 
verses it contained, strangely attracted by the beauty 
of their imagery and mysticism. Some I could not 
understand at all. Yet, even without the benefit of 
understanding, one felt conscious of their over- 
whelming beauty. 

I began to make inquiries about the life of An- 
thony Sorel. Who was he? Where did he live? 
Where was he born? His intimate knowledge of 
the folk and faerie lore of Ireland suggested indeed 
that he lived there. I asked. But no one knew. 

Two years went by before I discovered an old 
bookseller in Notting Hill who could answer my 
questions and then with no degree of assurance. 

“Anthony Sorel?” he said. “You mean him that 
killed that woman — killed that woman — Oh — I for- 
get her name.” 

“Killed a woman?” I said aghast — “the man who 
wrote those poems?” 


io 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“That’s it. Killed a woman.” 

“How?” 

“With his hands, I suppose. With a knife or 
something like that.” 

“But why?” 

“Ah — why does a man kill a woman, unless it’s 
because he hates her or loves her overmuch.” 

“Are you sure of this?” 

He nodded his head quite definitely. 

“Was he hanged for it?” 

“So I believe.” 

“When did this happen?” 

“Well — it must be twenty-odd years ago.” 

“Where?” 

“In Ireland, they say.” 

“Why doesn’t anybody know anything about it? 
For two years I’ve been asking people and you’re 
the first man who’s told me anything about it.” 

He shrugged his shoulders. 

“I know that much,” he said, “because I once 
had a book of his poems and a gentleman bought 
it from me, out of curiosity, he said. I remember 
his words at the time. ‘You don’t often find a poet 
and a murderer mixed up in one man,’ he said — and 
then he told me what I’ve just told you. He men- 
tioned the name of the woman, but I can’t remem- 
ber it.” 

This much I learnt of Anthony Sorel from the 
old bookseller in Notting Hill. It was quite enough 
to rekindle my interest. I read all his poems again, 
thinking as the bookseller’s customer had thought, 

2 II 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“You don’t often find a poet and a murderer mixed 
up in one man.” 

And every one of those poems I searched for one 
trace of that violence of passion which might show 
how he had been driven to such a deed, yet every- 
where there was gentleness itself — a strange gentle- 
ness that almost seemed as if it were not of this 
world at all. 

Only one couplet out of the many the book con- 
tained seemed to strike into my mind with a mean- 
ing I should not have dreamed of, if I had not heard 
his story. 

Out of sorrow — out of pain, 

You will find your soul again. 

Seek it not with burning eyes 
Where a starving passion lies. 

Seek it not with quickening breath, 

There it happens upon death. 

Was it so he had happened upon death? Was 
jealousy the cause, that common cause through which 
so many men have lost the power and dignity of 
reason? I read every poem once again, searching 
In vain for allusion to the passion of jealousy. I 
could find nothing but that gentle imagery, that 
mystical aloofness as though, when once he had 
taken up his pen, imagination and a buoyant 
fancy had carried him into some other world than 
this. 

I tried to forget the matter then, but again and 
.again it kept recurring to my mind. You know 
12 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


that sensation when some unaccountable instinct 
prompts you to adventure. Every considered motive 
of common-sense urges you not to set forth upon a 
wild-goose chase, yet something deeper than your 
conscience bids you go. Something, voiceless, tells 
you that you are sacrificing the illimitable unknown 
for the petty certainty of what you know. Up and 
forth, that voiceless voice commands you and, if 
there is but the spirit of a fearless soul within you* 
you set out. 

With spirit or without I went. The hunger of 
curiosity, if it were that alone, drove me to Ireland. 
From Dublin I took the train to Clogheen in Tip- 
perary, the nearest point I could get to that part 
of the mountains where Anthony Sorel had lived. 
Then I set out on foot, with what adventure you have 
heard already. 

Imagine then, when this old woman, living alone 
there in the heart of the mountains, imagine, when 
she mentioned the name of Anthony Sorel, how my 
heart leaped up. Already I felt that I was at the 
very gates of discovery. 

“What do you know about Anthony Sorel?” I 
asked. 

“Shure, what would I know indeed? ’Tis twenty 
years an’ more since he took the knife off av him 
an’ druv it into her soul, the way the blood was 
burstin’ out av both sides av her.” 

“He did kill her then?” 

Perhaps I had hoped there had been some mis- 
carriage of justice, some terrible fault in the reck- 
13 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

oning wherein he had kept silence for honor’s 
sake. 

“Is it kill her?” she replied “Shure didn’t they 
find her body out there on the heather, with her eyes 
turned up to the stars and the wind tossing her hair 
about, an’ she dressed like a peasant woman, the 
way I’d be myself.” 

“Was he there beside her?” 

“He was not. They found him when two days 
had gone, sitting by the lake up there in the moun- 
tains, he with no food in his stomach at all an’ just 
gazin’ into the water, the way he’d be waiting for 
them on May Eve.” 

By “them,” I knew she meant the faeries. 

“He was mad, then, was he?” I asked. 

“Mad? Is ut mad? Shure they asked himself 
down there in the Court House in Cork was he 
mad and didn’t he up and say to the judge, ‘Them’s 
mad,’ says he, ‘as looks for justice the way they’d 
hunt for a shillin’ under a shtone.* ’Twas himself 
said that to the judge. Shure, he was not mad at 
all. Yirra, there are some livin’ up in the moun- 
tains there now, can well remember him and they 
say that ’twas not himself that murdered the woman 
at all but ’twas the way the faeries took her. A 
man I know who says he’s seen Queen Maeve an’ 
milks a cow himself wid a broken leg to ut, he swears 
bi the saints he’s seen herself walking an’ she with 
the faeries down there in Foildarrig.” 

“Then he believes that Anthony Sorel was inno- 
cent?” 


14 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“He does indeed and he will believe it so as long 
as the goats make marbles.” 

“Where did she live? What sort of a woman 
was she?” 

“Is ut Anna Quartermaine ?” 

“Was that her name?” 

“That was the name av her an’ she livin’ down 
at Ballysaggartmore in a great big house the size ye 
could put a whole army av min into ut.” 

“Was she a lady then?” 

“She was indeed, wid tin servants if ye plaze an 5 
they all hangin’ on the steps av her like a row aw 
geese goin’ down to the water.” 

“How did she come to be in peasant’s dress then 
up there in the mountains?” 

I pressed my questions one quick upon the other, 
for the more I heard, the more my curiosity awak- 
ened; the more I felt the mysterious strangeness 
in this story that was growing before my eyes and 
at the very outset of my journey. 

“How did she come to be in peasant’s clothes?” 
she repeated. “Shure how do ye come to be sitting 
here on my chair and ye cornin’ all the ways from 
London? Faith it just happened, I suppose, unless 
it was as they say beyond over, that the faeries had 
taken her then an’ all the tin servants in Ballysag- 
gartmore were out huntin’ the heather for her, an’ 
she passin’ by through the middle av them an’ not 
one to know who she was.” 

“Do you think the faeries had taken her?” 

“Yirra, how would I know? There’s a man up 
15 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


there in Moonavaullagh and when last June was a 
year, the Amadhan got the shtroke av him an’ he 
walking over Scart bridge. He’s tellin’ wonderful 
tales now, but the earth’ll turn over before ever 
he sees the light of his wits again. Things 
happen.” 

Having said that, she fell back again into her 
former attitude, sitting there with her elbows on 
her knees, her hands covering her face, staring into 
the fire. And the wind howled outside and still the 
raindrops came spitting down the chimney. I 
thought of the lonely road I had just left, of the 
infinite stretches of mountain land drifting into the 
running mist and I had no wonder that these people 
could believe in strange happenings. 

By her very attitude, I knew that either she had 
no more to tell me, or had fallen into that state 
of reverie peculiar to her race from which no power 
of mine could waken her. Still I plied her with 
one more question. I asked her if she could tell 
me where I might find the man who had known 
Anthony Sorel, the man who had seen Anna Quar- 
termaine walking with the faeries in Foildarrig. 

“Are ye a police officer?” she asked then with a 
cunning glance at my face. 

I told her I was not. 

“Then what’s on ye? What is ut ye’re after 
wanting to find wid the pore man?” 

“I don’t want to find anything with him. I just 
want to try and make out why Anthony Sorel killed 
Anna Quartermaine.” 

1 6 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“There’s a man livin’ on Crow Hill knows that,” 
said she, “but he wouldn’t tell if God asked him in 
a little voice the way ye’d whisper a thing out av a 
child.” 

“What’s his name?” 

“He goes by the name of Malachi — ” 

“Malachi what?” 

“Faith if he knew that, he might be claimin’' 
himself out av the line of the kings of Ireland, he 
said.” 

I stamped that name on my memory and then 
she would say no more. She sat in her reverie 
until the kettle boiled on the peat fire. In silence 
she made the pot of tea, pouring a cup out for 
me and a cup for herself. It was black. There 
was no milk, nor did I like to ask for any. The 
liquid was warm and comfortable. I felt thank- 
ful for that. Still in silence, she offered me a piece 
of dry griddle bread, baked in the ashes of the fire, 
the crust of it still gray where it had rested in the 
embers. 

When the meal was finished she rose from her 
three-legged stool and, without divesting herself of 
a single garment, she climbed up into the bed and 
i covered herself with the horse blanket. 

“Ye can sleep there on the chair,” said she — “or 
ye can lie on the floor, if yeer skin’s not tinder 
an’ ye won’t mind the way the chicken fleas’ll be 
at ye.” 

I said I would stay on the chair. So there I sat 
and, as the wind shook the door on its hinges, I said 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


good night in my gratitude for the shelter she had 
given me. 

She made no answer, but I could hear the beads 
clicking one by one between her fingers as she prayed 
herself to sleep. 


CHAPTER II 


T HERE is little mysticism in England; the lives 
of people are almost destitute of imagination. 
Perhaps it is so in all big cities and England, 
in most parts, is one big city now. 

There are many who claim imagination, as, with 
more right no doubt, they claim a sense of humor. 
But their imaginings are prompted by experience. 
They imagine of the things that will be, from the 
things that have been. In Ireland they do not do 
that. 

In Ireland they imagine of the things that will be 
and the things that are, not from what the past has 
taught them, but as if they turned their eyes to 
heaven and had seen strange visions or as if they 
looked out into the mist across the mountains and 
heard strange sounds no other man had heard be- 
fore. There is that look in their eyes as in the 
eyes of a man who has just wakened out of sleep, 
not knowing which is more real, the world he lives 
in or the dream he has just dreamt. So they come 
easily to their belief in the faerie people. 

I came next day to Crow Hill in search of Malachi 
and found him to be an old man with such a look in 
his eyes as that of which I speak. 

He too lived in a one-roomed cottage that clung 
in lonely fashion to the side of Crow Hill. There 
19 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


you look upwards towards the summit of Knock- 
shunahallion that pierces into the low-hanging clouds. 
In nearly all the seasons of the year, the mists are 
eddying round it, steeping the lonely paths of it in 
mystery. 

There is always mystery in the thing you know 
of but cannot see. That is why mountains are so 
mysterious. There are but few days in the year 
when the peak of Knockshunahallion emerges into 
the clear sunlight and gives its face to the world. 
Then, as the people in those parts say, it is a woman, 
caught unawares as she looks at her reflection in a 
mirror. “She has the truth in her face to-day,” is 
what they say. But it is not as if it were the truth 
they desired. No one it seems would choose the 
truth from a woman. Mystery must envelop her. 
There the heart of her beauty lies. They are more 
at ease, more satisfied there on the mountainside, 
when the summit of Knockshunahallion is hidden in 
the misty vapors that conceal her face as a veil of 
gossamer conceals the eyes of a woman. So they 
know her best. 

There are many of them afraid of the faeries in 
those parts; many of them who would not dare to 
venture forth after dark on the roads when it is 
May Eve. But that fear of the mysterious, that 
consciousness of the unseen and the unknown is so 
much a measure of their lives, that they would not 
be without it. It seems as if they would mistrust 
life unless. 

When the old man Malachi opened the door to 
20 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


my knocking and I found him a withered creature 
some seventy years of age, dressed in a brilliant red 
shirt, a leather belt supporting on his limbs a pair 
of trousers of unbleached flannel, it was not these 
facts about him that I noted most. It was the look 
in his eyes. He thought I was a faerie man and 
dared not close the door in my face, neither dared 
he open it further and let me in. 

As I learnt from him long before we parted, he 
had seen faerie people many times in his life. Once 
a black pig that had looked at him over the wall, 
then uttered cries like a dying child as it sped off 
into the darkness. That night, so he told me, a 
black hen of his died on the roost under the old 
dresser. It fell to the floor with its head severed 
from its body, yet no one had slept in the house 
that night but himself. 

Again there was an old woman — dressed as the 
old women thereabouts are — who set a spell on his 
eyes and took him up into the mists of Knock- 
shunahallion, showing him there a pit in the earth 
that looked down into the heart of the world and 
there he saw his mother in Hell. His mother had 
hanged herself from the lintel of the door when he 
was a boy, because her husband continually beat her 
until life was a sick thing in her heart. Malachi had 
found her hanging there with the face of her dull 
black, her lips swollen, her tongue hanging out on 
her cheek with the flies walking over it. 

The priest had told him she was in Hell, because 
when a woman receives a beating at the hands of her 
21 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


husband, she must bear it patiently. It was the 
scourge of God upon Eve, the priest told him, and 
his mother had gone to Hell because she had taken 
her life to avoid it. He had pointed to the flies, 
saying that was a proof of where she was. 

So the old woman had taken Malachi up into the 
mountains and shown him his mother in Hell and 
his mother had called out, asking him to take the 
fire out of her eyes, but when Malachi had made to 
climb down into the pit, the old woman had held him 
fast. He had closed his eyes and struggled with 
her, because he loved his mother much. Suddenly 
then, her resistance vanished. He opened his eyes 
and found himself standing knee-deep in the wet 
heather on the side of Knockshunahallion and the 
dawn was breaking out in red and gold over the 
ridges in the east. But the pit and the old woman 
had vanished. She was a faerie, he told me. 

When I came to hear these things, I understood 
only too well that look in his eyes as he opened the 
door that day to me. 

It was not easy with that expression, half of won- 
der, half of fear, to explain what I wanted of him 
then. Indeed I remembered the old woman on the 
Clogheen road; what she had said of him; how 
he knew about Anthony Sorel, but would not tell, 
not even if God asked him in a little voice — so she 
had put it — as you would try and whisper a thing 
out of a child. 

For a moment then I was at loss to speak, but, 
swiftly gathering my wits together, I asked him if 
22 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

he knew of an inn in those parts where I could get 
lodging. 

At that he came outside his house and closed the 
door. There was the instinct of self-protection in 
the way he did it. It almost seemed as if he were 
relieved by the opportunity my question gave him of 
definitely keeping from me the shelter of his roof. 

“If ye go down the road past Doon,” said he, 
“there’s wan bi the name av Foley keeps a public- 
house at Araglin. Himself has a room there he let 
to a foreigner last year.” 

I smiled at his use of the word “foreigner.” Yet 
it is true enough, we are all foreigners to them. 
Although we both spoke the same tongue, I felt 
that he found me no less strange than I did him. 

How was I ever to learn — it struck me then — how 
was I ever to learn from him a story, he would not 
tell even to God Himself? But that doubtless was 
her way of speaking. I did not wholly despair. 

“How many miles is Araglin from here?” I asked. 

“Well — it might be two and it might be three.” 
Now he was eyeing me more with simple and fear- 
less curiosity. “If I’d be walkin’ it myself, I might 
find it was three.” He looked me up and down. 
“But ye’ve got the good legs on ye,” he added, as 
though the distance differed — as no doubt distance 
does — according to your power of covering it. 

I have often thought that. There is the distance 
of the mind and there is the distance of the body. 
It is so with Time. What are clocks? One mo- 
ment can be eternal. 


23 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“Do you often walk that distance?” I asked, seek- 
ing with every effort to draw him into some sort of 
conversation. 

“Every Sunday to Mass.” 

“There’s a chapel there?” 

“There is.” 

“Who’s your priest?” 

“Father Dorgan. Sometimes we’d be havin’ 
Father Killery from Ballysaggartmore.” 

I know my eyes must have lighted up at that. 

“Ballysaggartmore,” I repeated — “that’s where 
Anna Quartermaine lived — isn’t it?” 

He snatched a quick glance at me, quick and full 
of suspicion. 

“How did ye hear tell of Anna Quartermaine?” 
he asked. 

“Wasn’t it she who was murdered by Anthony 
Sorel?” I replied. 

He turned his head away, looking up to the peak 
of Knockshunahallion where the mists were still 
floating after the night of rain. And then he spoke, 
not as if he were speaking to me, but with a far-off 
note in his voice as though he would cast it to the 
ears of a people in another world than this. 

“Let them bring forth the seed of his body,” this 
was what he said, “but when a man do be walkin’ 
up and down in the mountains, the way a child hunts 
for shells at the strand of the sea, they’d destroy 
him entirely and they leanin’ out to take hold of the 
seed of his mind.” 

I listened intently, but not one word had a mean- 
24 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


ing, save that of conjecture, to me. He spoke of 
women and with a bitterness and contempt you so 
often find amongst the men in the wildest parts of 
Ireland. Indeed the land is dearer to them far. It 
is the land and seldom a woman they leave behind 
them when they go into the far countries. It is 
not often their poets sing of women but of the land. 
Beauty in women is a snare. They mistrust it. 
Few of the evil spirits in that sad country are men. 
A strange sexlessness inhabits the souls of the Irish 
people. Fierce as their passions are, they are more 
the passions of an excitable mind than of a suscep- 
tible body. So is the fame of Ireland world-wide 
for its virtue. 

I looked at him as he spoke, wondering at the 
strangeness of his life, could I but know it all; com- 
paring it with the lives of the men I knew in Lon- 
don, with my own life as well. He was a different 
being. It was not race that separated us, nor mode 
of living, neither habits, nor customs, nor language, 
so much as the whole structure of our minds. We 
are products of a modern civilization here; but in 
Ireland, with all the fervor of their Catholic faith, 
they are pagans, touching the truer meaning of things 
in all their mysticism and aloofness. It is they 
alone, amongst all the people of the West, who know 
the true value of life, who can appreciate the real 
momentary significance of death. 

“Are you speaking of Anna Quartermaine?” I 
asked him. “Are you speaking of her when you 
say that?” 


25 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“I’m sayin’ nothing at all,” said he, “but what 
any man might be sayin’ wid his eyes turned in- 
wards.” 

I offered him my pouch of tobacco, but he shook 
his head, taking out of his pocket a roll of coarse 
twist from which, with an old knife, he proceeded 
to cut a piece off into the horny palm of his hand. 
This he thrust into a remote corner of his jaw and 
then spat upon the ground. 

I watched the far-off expression in his face as he 
turned the quid in his mouth. It was true enough 
what the old woman on the Clogheen road had said. 
He would not tell his secrets even to God. How 
great a task then lay before me to persuade him to 
tell them to a foreigner! 

I felt no object was to be gained then by staying 
there any longer. I must get him accustomed to 
talking to me before I could approach the subject 
of Anthony Sorel again. Those moments with him 
were only time wasted. He had been there in that 
cottage on the side of Crow Hill for forty years, 
so he told me — forty years off and on. He was not 
going to leave it then. I could visit him again. I 
determined accordingly to climb up there from 
Araglin every day — every day until I had wooed 
from his lips the story I had set myself to hear. I 
was confident then in the early moments of my quest. 
But little did I know how difficult it would be ; how 
in the end, mere chance, rather than the power of 
my persuasion, would only wring it from him. 

“Well,” said I, at last — “I suppose I’d better be 
26 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

moving on. Can I miss my way to Araglin from 
here?” 

“The road’ll take ye,” said he — as if I were a 
child in its arms. “He has a fine room in the public- 
house there. I’ve heard tell ’tis an iron bed he has, 
wid knobs av gold on ut a man once tuk off an’ sold 
to a tinker for a wealth uv money. But himself got 
thim off av him when he’d a drop taken an’ they in 
the bag he had in his hand.” 

I moved away, saying I would tell the publican 
who had recommended me to his inn. I said it 
thoughtlessly, supposing it might mean a drink 
for him when he was down that way. I mentioned 
his name. 

“Who told ye I was named Malachi?” said he 
with quick suspicion, and I knew at once from the 
look in his eyes that I had raised an immediate bar- 
rier of apprehension in his mind. 

“An old woman,” I replied — “on the road from 
Clogheen.” 

“Wouldn’t I know ut!” he exclaimed. “Glory be 
to God — isn’t there more talk in a woman’s mouth 
than ye’d find lashins of fish in the sey?” 

I closed my lips and said no more. There was 
nothing more to be said. A little bridle-path twisted 
down to the road I could see winding away to the 
moors in the distance. Down that I stepped and 
when I had reached the road, I looked back. He 
was standing as I had left him, outside his door, 
gazing after me with those little eyes screwed deep 
into his head, his red shirt flaming like a soldier’s 
3 27 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


coat against the deep green of the heather. He 
seemed like a mountain sentry, guarding the gates 
behind which lay that secret my heart was now set 
upon discovering. 


CHAPTER III 


I F you climb over the high moorland that rises 
straight up above Ballyduif and the river Black- 
water, you will, after an hour’s rough walking, 
look down into the green vale of Araglin, through 
which the river of that name winds its way. Near 
and beyond it on the right rises the peak of Knock- 
shunahallion, while to the left, another six miles 
away, across a valley fed by the river Funshion, 
stands Galtymoor, lifting its three thousand feet of 
deep blue mountain into the sky. 

Not in any proper sense of the word is Araglin 
a valley, but so steep rises the moor and mountain 
land about it that, as you look down, it seems 
like a hidden emerald in the cup of these giants’ 
hands. 

They have a passion for names everywhere in 
Ireland — a passion moreover they know most poet- 
ically how to express. A cluster of white and pink- 
washed cottages, scarcely claiming the dignity of a 
street, will yet be given the honor of a name as 
though it were a village in itself. Such a place was 
Araglin in those days. I have no doubt it is just 
such a place to-day. 

From the top of those moors, you could faintly 
see that handful of cottages like a cluster of peb- 
bles in the bed of a stream. If of such a place' you 
29 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

can speak of a population, then there were a hundred 
souls — no more. 

A blacksmith with his forge was there. There 
was Foley, the publican. In one of the cottages 
lived a cobbler who followed a starving trade. Only 
the men at work in the fields and a few of the 
women wore boots that came to his last for the 
mending. There also stood alone, with all the dig- 
nity of a two-storied dwelling, the house where 
Father Dorgan lived at the time of which I write. 

I have reason to speak of this house again, and 
may well describe it. Baggs’ House it was called, 
from an old man of that name who had built it. 
There it had stood for sixty years and more, hidden 
away in a group of pine and oak trees. He had 
cared little for a view, it had seemed, still less for 
the open light of day. The oak trees must have been 
there for over a hundred years. He had merely 
cleared a space in the midst of them and there set 
down his dwelling-place. Though quite close to the 
rest of the cottages in Araglin, it was a lonely spot. 

All through the winter days and nights, the rain 
dropped from the trees on to the gravel drive, then 
green with moss and the tufts of grass that grew 
up here and there. In summer it was little better. 
All the sky was shut out, even from the upper win- 
dows. The gaunt, big rooms with their high ceilings 
were filled with an indescribable gloom which even 
the light through the abnormally large windows 
could not disperse. 

The walls were weather-slated to the ground. 
30 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


The windows had gray shutters that once were 
white. The whole house seemed to have been built 
on land of marshy dampness. Everything about it 
exuded water. In the rooms the faded paper was 
peeling in places from the walls, the ceilings were 
discolored and cracked. The knocker on the hall 
door, the iron bell-handle at the side, the metal slit 
of the letter-box, the scraper on the ground, they 
were all rusty, and the moss grew even in the cracks 
of the great slab of stone that served as a doorstep. 

Father Dorgan cared little enough for these signs 
of decay. He cared no more for the unenviable 
reputation that clung to his house itself. It was 
haunted, they said. There were those in Araglin 
— old people it is true, to whom maybe visions come 
easily — who had seen the ghost of Simon Baggs, 
with his full-bottomed coat and the stock about his 
neck, as he walked up and down from the front door 
of his house to the iron gate that opened on to the 
drive from the road. 

I can well imagine the specter. I have approached 
that rusty black gate at night time, making my way 
to the house, and with but the gentlest flight of 
fancy could believe I saw between the twisted bars 
that square set face — so they describe him — the 
beetled brows behind which the little eyes shone cun- 
ning and clear. Often as I have waited on that moss- 
covered doorstep, waiting for the untidy servant to 
open the door to my ringing, I have almost felt con- 
scious of his presence in the dark avenue of trees. 
While the old bell has jangled through the hollow 
31 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


house to a heavy silence, I have almost believed I 
heard his footsteps on the sodden gravel drive and 
have waited with an unnatural eagerness for the 
door to be opened, giving me the warm comfort of 
the light within. 

Here it was then that Father Dorgan lived, and 
from him, in that lofty dining-room of his, after his 
evening meal, when the fire was lighted and glasses 
of hot punch stood between lighted candles, steam- 
ing before us on the table, I learnt somewhat of 
Anthony Sorel, but not that secret for which I 
sought. 

But before I can come to this part of my story, 
I must speak first of Foley’s public-house where I 
remained all the time I was at Araglin. 

Tom Foley was not a prepossessing man. Like 
Simon Baggs’ house he needed the light of day. 
Malachi once said of him to me, “The sun never 
shines through the windows of his soul.” It was 
true. No one had ever seen him out in the open 
air. From the time he rose in the morning until 
the hour when he went to bed, he never crossed 
the threshold of his bar parlor. There he took his 
meals; there he sat all day and talked and was never 
wanting for company. 

I found him that morning leaning over the bar in 
the parlor, his bloodless face quite expressionless as 
he listened to the conversation of three men. One 
was the driver of a donkey butt which, with its load 
of glittering sprats, he had driven all the way from 
Ardmore. It was standing outside the door as I 
32 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


came in. The two other men were laborers from 
the fields, the earth thick-caked upon their boots. 

As I entered, the man from Ardmore was describ- 
ing a haul of mackerel he had seen the fishermen 
make in Ardmore Bay. All the wealth of language 
and richness of exaggeration by which in Ireland 
they do make speech so real a thing, was swelling 
from his lips. 

“The gulls had been cruishting outside all day,” 
he was saying — “an bi evenin’, there they were in 
the bay, lashin’ the water, an’ it black wid the tails 
av thim and they turnin’ over an’ over — shure 
couldn’t I see thim myself, glitterin’ there like a 
woman’s body an’ she buried in jools, the way Shaw- 
neen, whin he made the gold in America, tuk one o’ 
thim bad women and drowned her in pearls.” 

As though suddenly aware of the presence of a 
stranger, his voice dropped on the last words almost 
to a whisper. He stopped speaking and they all 
turned round. 

“A man named Malachi,” said I — “on Crow Hill, 
told me you had a room here where I could put up 
for a night or two.” 

“Is ut the man who has great talk about the 
faeries?” asked the one who came from Ardmore. 
“Him havin’ the story of the old woman who 
showed him his mother, an’ she burnin’ in Hell?” 

“Is ut the old fella beyond, wearin’ a red shirt 
he got off a tinker woman cornin’ out of Dingar- 
vin?” 

They all asked questions about Malachi. Not one 

33 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


of them seemed concerned with what I wanted, least 
of all the publican himself. 

When I had satisfied them who my informant was, 
I inquired of Foley if it were true he had a room 
to let. 

“I have indeed,” said he, but made no movement 
to show me where it was or to get to business. He 
still leaned there over the dirty counter of his bar 
and stared at me with curious eyes. The others 
drank their porter and stared at me as well. 

“Well — could I see it?” I inquired. 

“Ye cannot,” said he. 

“It’s not to let then?” 

“It is indeed — shure aren’t I just after sayin’ so.” 

“Well,” said I— “I should like to see it if I could.” 

“An’ I’m tellin’ ye, ye can’t,” he replied. 

“Why not?” 

“Because there’s an old sow been havin’ a litter 
of fourteen there last week and the good ’ooman 
has not had the inclination to tidy up the place since. 
I’ll set herself on to ut now and ’twill be ready for 
ye in an hour’s time.” 

It was not a cheerful prospect, but I had to make 
myself content with it. No other place was possible 
in Araglin and whatever it proved to be, I knew I 
should have to be satisfied. 

The building itself was long, low and one- 
storied. No painted sign was there outside to 
attract the unsuspecting traveler. Doubtless it once 
had been a row of cottages and, with the monopoly 
of the trade, had grown into one establishment. 

34 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


Father Dorgan’s was the only two-storied house in 
the neighborhood. Even the constabulary where the 
two policemen dwelt, was a thatched cottage, rising 
not more than one floor from the ground. 

For that hour, whilst the good woman was over- 
coming her disinclination to tidiness and my room 
was being made ready for me, I wandered about the 
village. 

On the banks of the river Araglin, I found the 
whole constabulary, the two policemen, responsible 
for law and order, fishing for trout in the brown 
waters of that little rushing stream. Both eyed 
me, not with suspicion, but with a candid, village 
curiosity. Araglin sees few travelers. Few 
strangers ever come that way. 

A little further on beyond the village, I saw the 
figure of a priest walking before me on the same 
bank of the river. I knew it must be Father Dorgan. 
He was reading his morning office, but before I came 
up with him, the task was finished. I saw him put 
the book away in his pocket. 

Here was a man, I thought, who no doubt could 
help me in my quest. The parish priest in Ireland 
knows his people as well as he knows the well- 
thumbed pages of his breviary. 

“Good morning, father,” said I. 

He turned more quickly than seemed natural to 
his mood at the sound of a strange voice. 

“Good morning to ye,” said he and immediately 
his curiosity got the better of him. “You’re a 
stranger in these parts,” he added. 

35 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

I was, I told him. I said at once I came from 
London. 

“ ’Tis a great place,” said he. “Is ut the way 
ye’re goin’ to Ballyduff over for the fishin’?” 

“No,” said I — “I’m not a fisherman. I’m just 
going to stay for a bit at the inn here, if they can 
put me up.” 

“Oh — shure, Foley’ll see to that,” said he with 
a humorous knowledge of the man. “He’d put up 
the King himself an’ feed him on ham an’ eggs 
rather than miss a bit of money.” 

I felt in the way he said it, that he had spoken 
of the King for my benefit, to please me because he 
knew I was an Englishman. Had I been one with 
a brogue from Dublin, he would have spoken of the 
Pope, maybe. 

In swift moments during the silence that followed, 
I stole quick glances at him while we walked to- 
gether, just as I knew he was taking his stock of me. 

He was a thin, spare man. Large-boned he was, 
with big, nervous-looking hands and high cheek 
bones, throwing deep shadows into the hollows be- 
low. His eyes were gray and set far back beneath 
the overhanging brows. He gave me the impression 
that he fasted often and was given much to the 
chastisement of his body and his soul. I could 
imagine him, like monks of old, inflicting upon him- 
self the pains of flagellation, beating himself as he 
said his prayers. 

What he found in me, I cannot say, but without 
conceit, I think I am right in believing that from 
36 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


the moment of our short conversation that morning, 
he took a quiet fancy to me. 

“How long are ye goin’ to stay in Araglin?” he 
asked me presently. 

I admitted the truth. I did not know. It all 
depended so much upon the success of my quest. 

“And shure what brought ye to this shtrip of 
God’s earth?” said he, smiling, it seemed to me, in 
order to conceal his curiosity. 

“I was told I should find an inn here where I could 
put up.” 

“Who told ye?” 

“An old man up in the mountains there — a man 
named Malachi.” 

“Malachi — living on Crow Hill! Glory be to 
God, shure there’s a strange wan for ye! Ye don’t 
find the likes of him walking down the Shtrand in 
London.” 

I laughed. 

“He’s an interesting old man,” said I. 

Father Dorgan’s face assumed a serious expres- 
sion. His eyes, as Malachi had said to me, in that 
moment were looking inwards. 

“Away in the mountains here,” he said presently 
— “and in all the mountains in the west, ye’ll find 
many a man like Malachi. Yeer advanced doctor, 
he’d say they were mad. Shure, bring them down 
into the cities and ’tis mad they are. But up there 
in the mists, in their lonely cottages, there’s a queer 
kind of wisdom about thim, the way they’d know 
things it ’ud seem strange for any human man to 
37 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


get a hold of. He’s traveled, mind ye, that old 
man. Many’s the season he’s been harvesting in 
Wales across the water. There’s not a word he can 
read or can write, but he’ll tell ye tales he might 
have ransacked the libraries of Europe for, if ye’ll 
give him a drop of whisky to warm up the blood in 
his veins. Oh — shure he’s mad and there are times, 
mind ye, when I’d be as mad meself if by that I could 
see the things he has the power of seeing.” 

“What things?” 

I was as ready to be curious as he. For it was 
not only what he said, but the lowering of his voice 
to a note of suggestive suppression my ears were 
only too eager to receive. 

When he did not answer, I asked again. 

“What things?” 

He looked up at me with a slow smile — a smile, 
characteristic of him, which never seemed really to 
fulfill its first intention, but died away before it had 
suggested laughter. 

“Have ye ever been to this country before?” he 
inquired. 

“Yes,” said I. 

“But ye live in London?” 

“Yes.” 

“Well — there’s not much ye’d understand if I 
were to tell ye a half of the things that old man can 
see with his two eyes shut.” 

“Do you fancy me incapable of thinking that 
those are the things worth seeing?” I asked. 

He stopped a moment as we walked and stood 

38 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


gazing across at the mountains, then turned sharply 
and looked at me. 

“Ye do think that?” 

“I do,” said I, falling easily into that habit of 
speech in Ireland which neither allows of yes or no. 

“Come round one evening while ye’re here,” said 
he — “an’ have a talk with me. Just drop in.” 

By now we were standing on the rough stone 
bridge that spans the river, carrying the road from 
the south up into the mountains. Before I had 
time to thank him for the invitation, he had left me. 
With long, slouching paces he was striding up the 
road, his head dropped between his shoulders as 
one, not only who thinks and reads, but carries his 
thoughts with him wherever he goes. 


CHAPTER IV 


I N an hour’s time the room at Foley’s was ready 
for me, Mrs. Foley herself took me in charge 
and brought me to the door of it, explaining 
in a ceaseless flow of conversation how it was not 
usual for them to have strangers coming that way 
for whom they had to prepare the room at a mo- 
ment’s notice. 

Indeed that sudden preparation had put her in 
none the best of tempers. She was prepared for 
immediate aggression. I was obliged to pick my 
words. As she flung open the door, she gave me 
to understand that if by word or look I showed I 
did not like the room — always the room, as though 
it were a state apartment — then I might go else- 
where and waste no time about it. 

But — “ ’tis aiqual to the deuce,” said she — 
“whether ye like it or not.” 

This was what she said as she flung open the door. 
It was, I felt sure, a sensitive apprehension that 
brought about this aggressiveness in her. I was 
English. For all she knew I might be accustomed 
to the most luxurious style of living and were I to 
express an opinion reflecting upon her pride, she 
would no longer have had any occasion for me. 

This is the pride of all these people. Poor, un- 
tidy, wanting even in cleanliness and with no pos- 
40 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


sessions of which to boast, they are yet intensely 
proud — kings and queens of an impoverished mon- 
archy. So far as one can find justification for it, 
it is true pride; not that of purse or of possession, 
but a pride in themselves and always apprehensive 
of injury. 

She stood there regarding me in readiness for a 
rebuff as I looked round the room. There was the 
bed Malachi had spoken of, doubtless an 
inspiring piece of furniture to them in Araglin, 
though I could not believe how anyone had ever 
found it worth while to steal those lacquered brass 
knobs that adorned it. A piece of carpet, thread- 
bare and long worn in holes, partly covered the 
floor. The washstand, the dressing-table, the chest 
of drawers, they were of plain varnished deal. 
There was no fireplace. Above the window hung 
tattered lace curtains, in places rent, with jagged 
edges. There was no blind. 

“Well — this will do splendidly,” said I — “it’s an 
excellent bed.” 

“ ’Tis a feather mattrass,” said she more genially. 
“Shure, ’twas I brought it out of Dingarvin whin 
I was married to himself.” 

“I’m sure it’ll be very comfortable,” I replied 
amiably. 

“Well — it is then. Haven’t I slept on it times and 
again whin himself had a drop taken an’ he kickin’ 
me out av me own bed. They say ’tis the way 
thim mattrasses do be harborin’ the insects, shure 
I wouldn’t believe it at all. It wasn’t many I 
41 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


found on that wan and there am I tellin’ ye now.” 

I thanked her for her candid information as best 
I could and thereby made another friend in Araglin. 
Once having passed the ordeal of my approval, she 
became kindness itself. There was nothing that she 
would not do for me. Indeed for many a long day 
shall I carry in my mind the memory of Mrs. Tom 
Foley. She was a buxom woman, though energetic 
enough, with all the abundance of flesh God had 
given her to carry. Her little eyes, half opened, as 
though at birth the eyelids had never properly been 
parted, were full of twinkling good humor. She 
was, I think, the plainest woman I have ever seen. 
Those little eyes of hers, so crudely set beneath a 
shapeless forehead, were like the eyes of a pig, 
half mischievous, half cunning. Her voice was the 
most raucous thing in women I have ever heard. To 
add to the penetrating power of it, it was high- 
pitched and, as one who drives in nails, she ham- 
mered it relentlessly upon your ears. 

But with all these disadvantages, she was a homely 
creature, given to gossip as all of them are, to spite- 
ful gossip when her temper was roused; but a good 
friend and generous with it all to those who found 
favor in her eyes. 

I have taken some pains to describe her because 
if there is such a thing as the practical aspect of 
life in Ireland, it is women like Mrs. Tom Foley 
who represent it. She stands out in my mind in 
violent contrast to the lonely figure of that old man 
up in the mountains, even to the quiet figure of 
42 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


Father Dorgan who, had it not been for his faith, 
would have been as much a visionary as any. 

Greatly as all this may seem to be digressive, it is 
in reality no departure from my story. Conditions 
of life in Araglin then, were much the same as when 
Anthony Sorel lived in his little one-roomed cottage 
on the side of Knockshunahallion and came down 
the mountain road into the village to buy such food 
as he needed. 

As I have heard from all those who saw him, it 
was often only bread he bought. Cronin was the 
baker in those days, but he had been dead some 
many years, the cottage and little bakehouse pass- 
ing into the hands of Wolsey, his successor. 

But even on that first day of my arrival, I found 
one, an ex-policeman, living on his pension in a little 
cottage at the end of the village, who had seen 
Anthony Sorel many times on those occasions when 
he came down from the mountains. 

From him I received my first description of An- 
thony Sorel’s appearance. Together with other 
sources of information, I have pieced together a 
picture in my mind, the accuracy of which I, at least, 
am content with. 

At the time that he must first have met Anna 
Quartermaine, he was still a young man, not more 
than thirty-seven at the utmost. 

“But I’ve seen older men with less years on their 
backs,” said the ex-sergeant, describing the appear- 
ance of his age to me. 

I can quite understand how he did not carry him- 
4 43 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


self to the full height of his five foot eleven. This 
exact measurement I had on good authority. He 
was not a small man. But what I have said of 
Father Dorgan, could doubly have applied to 
Anthony Sorel. His thoughts, his imaginations, his 
belief in faeries, these alone he lived with, carry- 
ing them with him wherever he went. His figure 
too was slim, not exactly wasted in any sense, but 
with that slightness of body which tells of an ever- 
consuming fire within. 

“ ’Twas himself burnt the candle of his soul,’’ one 
old man said to me and well I can understand the 
expressiveness of that phrase. 

The color of him was dark, his black hair, as one 
may well suppose with such limited conveniences as 
Araglin could afford, untidy, long even, and un- 
kempt. The tone of his skin was pale, no color in 
his cheeks; but not as in one who suffers from ill- 
health. 

“Is ut suffer wid his health,” said one to me — 
“an 1 he livin’ like a goat on the side of the moun- 
tains?” 

I can quite believe he was strong and healthy 
enough. That burning candle of his soul consumed 
the heat of blood in him. Our country people in 
England, living such open lives as this, have no 
emotions of the mind upon which their blood 
may spend its warmth. Their cheeks are apple red. 
They go to their sleep at nights with easy souls 
and minds untroubled by the lightless skies. It is 
not this way with those who live in such fashion in 
44 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

Ireland. There was not one of those people in the 
mountains, unless here a young girl or there a young 
man, who showed a pair of rosy cheeks all weather- 
burnt with glowing health. Yet they are strong 
enough and perhaps a thousand times more tenacious 
of life. 

This I imagine was the condition of Anthony 
Sorel. Because his cheeks were thin and pale, I do 
not suppose him one of fragile health. I have seen 
the cottage, now roofless and windowless, where he 
lived and there, in the teeth of the countless winds 
of God’s heavens, it would have been hard for any 
man to have suffered in his body and have lived. 

His eyes, they told me, these were the most strik- 
ing feature he possessed, and that I can imagine well. 
Some eyes are dull and almost lifeless ; some sparkle 
to the healthy blood that rushes through the veins. 
There are eyes that shine, all brilliant with their 
own intelligence. But the eyes of Anthony Sorel held 
never the same light from one day to another. They 
burnt as they looked outwards. They slumbered 
as they gazed within. 

“I’ve seen him look,” the old sergeant said to 
me — “the way ye’d think he was pickin’ the soul out 
av ye wid the point of a pin; an’ I’ve seen him look, 
the way ye’d feel ye might be gone, dead and buried, 
for all he’d know ye were there at all.” 

From such descriptions as these it is, that I have 
gathered and pieced together in my mind a picture 
of Anthony Sorel, convincing enough, indeed indel- 
ible to me. 


45 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


His forehead may have been high, but that black 
hair in loosened locks mostly covered it. I do not 
imagine his face to have been of that order one 
speaks of as intelligent. It was long from the eyes 
to the chin. The mouth was so sensitive, I can well 
conceive of the temerity of those who spoke with 
him. But it was a wonderful face, they have told 
me. Tenderness and understanding were all alive 
in it when his mind was not occupied with that mys- 
terious aloofness which seemed to erect an insur- 
mountable barrier between himself and those with 
whom he came in contact. 

One interesting thing, the old sergeant said to 
me. In all the investigations I made regarding the 
life and death of Anthony Sorel in Ireland, I remem- 
bered it best of all. 

“What was on him at all,” said he, “for him to 
be takin’ the knife to her? Shure he wouldn’t have 
taken a green linnet out of its nest — that was the 
way wid him.” 

Unhappily it must be said that amongst the Irish 
people, kindness to animals and birds is the extreme 
proof of gentleness. In those parts — I cannot speak 
of others — they think nothing of taking a linnet 
from its nest as it sits bravely and fearlessly upon 
the eggs. Once caught, they put it in a cage using 
it as a snare to catch its mate. It would even amaze 
them to hear that that was cruelty. 

The sergeant truly thought him a gentle creature 
when he admitted that. 

“It was with a knife he killed her then?” I asked. 

46 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“Shure it was av course and he with fingers like 
the strings av Patsy Troy’s fiddle, the way ye’d think 
they could speak if they touched ye. Faith if he 
took hold of a bubble, he wouldn’t break ut.” 

This was another little feature to add to my mind 
portrait of Anthony Sorel. Fingers like fiddle 
strings! It is expressive in its way. I can see the 
sensitive hands which that simile brings so vividly to 
my mind. White as a woman’s perhaps, tender 
and gentle too. Hands that were all a part of the 
expression of intense refinement in him. If he took 
hold of a bubble, the sergeant said, he would not 
break it. I can well imagine them giving that im- 
pression to a man of his superficial observation. 
But I can see the nervous strength in them too, the 
emotional power which, under the stress of passion, 
could well commit the deed of which he was accused 
and convicted; for which he suffered the utmost 
penalty of the law. 

“You’re all sure he killed her then,” said I, pres- 
ently. 

“Shure, wasn’t he tried at the Cork Assizes and 
didn’t they hang him up at the jail there along by 
the Western Road? Haven’t I seen the place my- 
self? Did ye think ut was the way the faeries had 
taken her?” 

He put this last question to me with a laugh. In 
the capacity of a late member of the force, he had 
nothing to do with such stories as that and would 
let me know it. But when I did not join in his 
laughter, when he saw the still serious expression in 
47 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


my eyes, the Celt in him rose uppermost. The 
laughter fell from his lips and he leant across to me. 

“I met a woman once, mind ye,” said he, lower- 
ing his voice — “an’ she after walking all the ways 
out of Ballyduff. ’Twas herself told me she’d seen 
Anna Quartermaine on a May Eve. The mists were 
over Ballysaggartmore and there were the cows 
standin’ out in the fields the way she couldn’t see 
their feet an’ they up to their knees in the white 
water of the mist like as they’d be standin’ in a 
stream. An’ didn’t she have to take her ways 
across the fields, not seeing her feet beneath 
her as she put them down and with the heart beat- 
ing in her because it was May Eve an’ after dark 
— the night when the faeries are out, singing up 
in the mountains an’ dancing down the boreens. 
’Twas she heard the voice of someone singing — and 
there’s a woman, mind ye, who’d tell no lies. ’Twas 
singin’, she said, like ye’d ’tice sleep out av a child. 
And there up against the flank of one of the cows 
sat herself, milking the beast an’ she croonin’ all 
the whiles to herself. It was as if the mist rose up 
all round her and made a dress for her to clothe 
herself in and there was drops of dew in her hair 
that shone like rubies and emeralds in the light of 
the moon. Wisha, I dunno did she see it at all, but 
there was a woman who told no lies before or since, 
an’ she goin’ to Mass every Sunday in Ballysaggart- 
more.” 

“You do believe in faeries then?” I asked, for his 
voice had come to that whisper when a man believes 
4 S 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


the truth of all he says as though it were the inspired 
word of God. 

“I do not,” said he. “Shure why would I be- 
lieve in faeries, an’ I drawing me pension from the 
Gover’ment like an honest man?” 

I could not help smiling. It was no longer the 
Celt who spoke. Officialdom will kill even the spirit 
of the race in man. This was the price of his 
pension. 

Here then I have tried to convey the portrait of 
Anthony Sorel that is so plainly set before my mind. 
No picture of him that I have ever heard of is in 
existence. I have had to content myself with the 
gleanings from the observations of others, and these, 
with no reservations, I have written into the text 
of this story, which surely no other country but 
Ireland could ever have made. 


CHAPTER V 


E ARLY the next morning, I took the mountain 
road and went in search of Malachi. 

The day had broken with all the riches of 
brilliant sunshine, but before long, out of the south- 
west rode a fleet of clouds. They moved like ships 
of war in battle array. The foremost of them 
as they came, swept their shadows down the moun- 
tainsides like the colored raiment a magician flings 
and flings again distractingly before your eyes. I 
never felt so much as then, the living things that 
mountains are, with moods and fancies in such 
bewildering variety. 

As with a woman, never are they wholly revealed. 
The most searching light of sun, the clearest and 
most cloudless sky cannot disclose all the secrets they 
contain. Never do they stand forth entirely robbed 
of mystery. With shadows one peak will protect 
another as with a thousand subtleties a woman will 
protect her sex. Always there is some ravine, some 
deep abyss the sun can never penetrate. 

I watched the light that morning come and go as 
I walked up the mountain road. In its most brilliant 
illumination, as in its deepest shadow, it was always 
the same; there was an emotional sense of mystery 
in that world of solitude, no process of the mind 
could explain away. 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


Then, as I walked, I set to wondering whether I 
could find in the never-expressed recesses of my con- 
science, that real belief in faeries and the spirits of 
the other world. But they were too intangible to me 
then. 

By the time I had reached the foot of Crow Hill 
and it became necessary for me to leave the road, 
taking to the little path that made its way through 
the heather, the fleet of clouds had gathered into 
rain. A thin mist was blowing like puffs of smoke 
across the mountains. Knockshunahallion was now 
hidden, now in sight as if in moments it spoke and 
then again was wrapped in some silent contemplation 
within itself. So after some days in that part of the 
world, I came to the understanding of how the 
mountains and the trees, the streams and lakes can 
all speak to one — speech like the discourse of a close 
and understanding friend who talks of things nearest 
to the unspoken secrets of one’s soul and can fall 
into that truest silence with its utter absence of intru- 
sion upon all one’s thoughts. 

Reaching my destination, I found the old man, 
Malachi, digging in the patch of ground beside his 
cottage. As soon as he heard my footsteps ap- 
proaching, he ceased from his labor and leant heav- 
ily upon his spade, watching me as I came up the 
path. 

“Well — I find the inn very comfortable,” said I — 
“thanks to your recommendation. It’s a great bed, 
that bed with the brass knobs.” 

“I niver seen it meself,” said he guardedly. 

51 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


It was the way he spoke, as much as the way 
he looked at me that for one instant made me feel 
ashamed of the part I was playing. I was there 
to steal a secret from him, a secret he would not 
confide to God Himself and I felt the unconscious 
resentment in him against my presence there. What 
right, I asked myself, was with me in the purpose 
of my mind? The secret, if indeed he possessed it, 
was his. His jealous guarding of it was a proof of 
what it meant to him. 

For when once a secret is spoken, it plays no 
longer any part in the life of him who held it. The 
very words that tell it, are the broken atoms it 
becomes. 

Should I go back, relinquishing my quest? Should 
I let it for ever be the mystery it was to me; believ- 
ing, when the mood would have it so, that the faeries 
had taken Anna Quartermaine or in another humor, 
seeing it merely the outburst of passion in a criminal 
mind? Why was I not content with the mere knowl- 
edge that Anthony Sorel had killed her, content as 
others were to whose knowledge the fact had chanced 
to come? 

In those moments of a pricking conscience, I asked 
myself these questions; for then I could see myself 
as a common journalist, picking the souls of others 
for my daily bread. But it was no good asking 
them. I was not content. Some hidden purpose, 
foreign to all gain, seemed there to be served if I 
could but prosper. I had gone too far in my search. 
It had become impossible to turn back then. I put 
52 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

the mood away and talked to Malachi about him- 
self. 

It was early Spring then. He was preparing the 
patch of ground for his potatoes. 

“Do you eat much meat?” I asked him, curious 
in mind about his ways of living. 

“Meat?” He looked at me with his little eyes. 
“Where would I be eatin’ meat?” 

“None at all?” 

“Sometimes they give me a pig’s cheek salted and 
I’d be eatin’ a bit o’ that.” 

I asked him if he did not buy fish from the men 
who came round with their donkey butts. 

“There was a man down there in Araglin,” I told 
him, “who came from Ardmore with sprats.” 

“I haven’t tasted fish these tin years,” he replied, 
“ ’cept on Good Fridays when I’d be makin’ a 
meal for meself an’ havin’ a piece of ling. Shure 
where would I be gettin’ the copper money to buy 
fish from thim fellas?” 

“Don’t you get any money for the work you 
do?” 

“Work? Shure, I don’t work. What work 
would I be doin’ an’ me hands tied in knots?” He 
took a hand from his spade and held it out for me 
to see; a twisted, horny thing like some willow root, 
bent and wrinkled with its clinging to the earth. “I 
live here, yirra,” he added — “I don’t work. What 
work would a man like meself be doin’ here away in 
the mountains?” 

It was as we were speaking that the mist broke 

53 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


into driving rain. He shouldered his spade and 
made slowly for the cottage door. 

“May I come in?” I asked as he opened it. 

“Shure, why not,” said he. 

I followed him within, watching him in silence as 
he took the handle of the bellows-wheel and kindled 
the dull embers of his little fire into flames. 

“What do you do with yourself here in the long 
winter evenings,” I inquired presently. “In Jan- 
uary and December when it’s dark at four o’clock?” 

He looked up at me as though questioning my 
right to that inquisitiveness. I thought at first he 
was going to keep silent, but at last he spoke. 

“Aren’t there all the tales of the world for a 
man to be tellin’ himself?” he asked strangely. 
“Wouldn’t a man be dumb with the tongue stiff in 
his mouth an’ he havin’ no man to talk wid him?” 

“Who comes up here then to talk to you those 
nights?” 

“Shure, who, indeed! Is there a man would trust 
himself out from his fireside on the black mountain, 
whin the cry of a curlew would turn the blood to 
ice in him?” 

“Who do you talk with then?” I persisted. 

“I talk wid meself. Aren’t I after sayin’ a man 
would be dumb wid the tongue stiff in his mouth? 
Shure I talk with meself.” 

He said it as though there were two persons within 
him and I experienced a strange sensation of awe, 
rather than that of fear, as I thought of that old 
man alone there through the wintry evenings, alone 
54 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


in his cottage in the mountains. I wondered what 
the things were he could say — strange things I 
imagined, which, could I but hear them, I should 
scarcely understand. A feeling almost of horror 
came over me. I shuddered as I considered the 
strangeness of his life. It was so far out of the 
world. I knew well how in civilized conditions, 
those conditions in which we tell ourselves all prog- 
ress lies, how this old man would be thought to be 
mad. 

He could not read, he could not write. So much 
had Father Dorgan informed me. And there alone, 
while the long winter evenings spun out their dark- 
ness into the deeper blackness of the night, he sat 
by his fire telling himself the tales of the world. 
What tales were they? Straightly I asked him what 
kind of tale he meant. 

“The tales of the men who have loved and fought 
with the sword,” he said — “the tales of the men 
who have gone into the still places, where the heatin’ 
of yeer heart would be no more than the wind in 
the grasses. The tales of war when the hosts came 
up out of the East and the hosts came up out of the 
West and one woman was the death of tin thousand 
men.” 

I watched his face in wonder while he was say- 
ing this. Had the circumstances been different, had 
it been any other man, I should have thought he was 
talking wild nonsense, trying to impress me with the 
knowledge and the wisdom he possessed. But I 
could not think that of him. He spoke indeed like 
55 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


one concealing his knowledge rather than expressing 
it. He made me feel there were a thousand things 
in the world he knew of, to which my mind was as 
dead. 

And then at last, after he had been speaking in 
this strain for some moments, he launched forth into 
one of the wildest and most inconceivable stories I 
had ever listened to in all my life. Scripture and 
history, mythology and folk-lore, all were mingled 
in one incoherent narrative that took no heed of 
time or place but sped through the centuries and 
across the regions of the world with such disregard 
for the accepted dimensions of possibility as could 
only have come from an unconstrained imagina- 
tion. 

Then I realized somewhat of what Father Dorgan 
meant when he said that Malachi was mad, but that 
it was a madness he would not fear to share if it 
gave him the power of seeing those things which 
Malachi could see. 

What were those things, I wondered, for slowly 
the belief was growing in me that such things did 
indeed exist. My eyes were blind to a whole world 
that was revealed to this old man. The external 
things were those only which I could see. But for 
him, there was a vision beyond mere externals. He 
could speak of the passion of a thousand years, as 
I should speak of the life of one man. He could 
see in terms of things eternal, when I must divide 
my day by the hands of a clock. In his imagination, 
he could travel to the furthest ends of the earth, 
56 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


speaking in wild poetry of lands I only could reach 
by aid of modern science and could not conceive of 
without. 

As these thoughts came to me, I looked about the 
room in search of some clock or means by which he 
could determine on the hour. There was none. 

“Don’t you keep a clock here?” I asked. 

He shook his head. 

“Have you got a watch then?” 

“I have not,” said he. 

“How do you tell the time then?” 

His little eyes dwelt on me for some moments. I 
felt almost there was contempt in his mind as he 
regarded me. At last he answered. 

“Away there,” said he and he pointed through 
the wall of the cottage — “away there lies the East 
an’ whin the sun comes burnin’ up over Knockna- 
fallia, ’tis the day, an’ whin it drops in a bloody red 
behind Carran Hill there, ’tis night. Isn’t that 
enough for a man to be knowing? How would I be 
readin’ one o’ thim clocks an’ I can’t read me own 
name ? Shure, glory be to God, let thim talk about 
time as gets paid bi ut. Time!” he exclaimed — and 
what a note of contempt he had in his voice — “Yirra, 
I wouldn’t distress meself wid ut.” 

I thought of our clerks in the cities, watching the 
hands of the clock as they worked at their desks. I 
thought of the thousands whose daily attitude 
towards life was as that of a man who with his own 
fingers counts out the minutes on the graduated dial. 
These were they and in their millions, who distressed 
57 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


themselves with Time. So many of the external 
things were on their hands to do, yet they must divide 
them into a thousand atoms to help them count its 
passing. But this old man without one property to 
distract his mind could count his day just by the 
rising and the setting of the sun. At that moment 
I looked at him with honest envy. 

“I wish I could say as much,” said I. 

We fell then to talking of different matters. Of 
what was going on in the world — that world I had 
left behind me — I found he knew nothing. Had he 
been able to read, I doubt if he would ever have 
seen a paper. His world was his own. He made 
it out of his imagination, but so far from that making 
him unintelligent, it was as though in a man who has 
lost the sense of sight, all other senses were more 
keenly tuned in him. He spoke the wisdom of his 
own thoughts which made me realize how much the 
spread of education and of modern journalism has 
killed the power in a man to think for himself. 

Wild as his wisdom was, there were in it those 
great and sudden flashes of the truth. “Time!” he 
had said — “I wouldn’t distress meself with ut!” 
And had he said that alone, I should have given him 
more wisdom than I could have found in a day’s 
march amongst the men one knows as wise. Who 
but one who thought for himself would have imag- 
ined the use of that word? To distress oneself with 
Time ! How many thousands there are who do ! 

So, as we talked of other things, I led him gently 
to the subject foremost in my mind. He spoke of 
58 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


the lonely lake in that desolate hollow on Knock- 
shunahallion. 

“Shure, there’s no depth to ut at all,” said he, 
lowering his voice mysteriously; by which I knew he 
meant that it was fathomless. “ ’Tis black as night. 
Haven’t I seen the water on a day in Summer and 
the sun shining down into ut, with shafts av light 
the way ye’d go blind in the eyes if ye tuk a look 
up at ut, an’ didn’t the light shtrike down white into 
the water an’ didn’t the water turn it as black as 
Tim Hennissey’s goat? It did indeed. Shure if ye 
threw a shtone into that lake and wint round the 
world and came back again on yeer two feet 
shtandin’, ’twould still be sinkin’ an’ sinkin’.” 

This was the lake by the side of which they had 
found Anthony Sorel. I urged Malachi to tell me 
more. 

“Has anyone ever been drowned in that lake?” I 
asked and I found my voice too was dropping to the 
mysterious whisper as though to keep in tune with 
his. 

He stared for a long while into the fire and then 
at last he answered. 

“Did ye hear them speak of Maggie Donovan at 
Tom Foley’s at all?” he inquired. 

“No,” said I. 

For a moment he looked silently before him. 
Then he spat into the fire. 

“ ’Twas she had the beauty of all women,” he said 
presently — “an’ she with the young fellas from all 
over, dancing wid her at the cross roads an’ takin* 
5 ' 59 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


her walking up there into the hills. ’Tis crazed they 
were an’ she as beautiful as a blackthorn tree on a 
long Spring day.” 

He would have fallen into a reverie once more, 
continuing the story in the silence of those dreams 
of which his life seemed greatly to be composed. 
Indeed I remember now, for it comes thus prompted 
to my mind, the vivid impression he gave me then ; 
it was as of one walking in his sleep who wanders 
from room to room of a vast and silent house, each 
room, as he comes upon it, awakening some dim 
remembrances of the daily life, then fading again 
into the muffled distance of his dream. 

Into such a reverie, he would have fallen then, 
but with the eagerness of my questioning, I stirred 
him from it. 

“What happened to Maggie Donovan up at the 
lake?” I asked. 

He moved on his chair, but still his eyes were star- 
ing deep into the heart of the fire as though it were 
the essence of those thoughts his mind was 
wrapped in. 

“ ’Twas Maggie Donovan was walkin’ by the 
road, an’ she in her hair wid her littleen shawleen 
dropped down behind her neck, coming by Foildar- 
rig. An’ hadn’t she the beauty of all women, an’ 
didn’t the sparks come out of the boots av the min 
that danced wid her at the cross roads, the way they 
danced so lustily? They did indeed. And wasn’t 
there Nanno O’Shea wid her that day and she tellin’ 
the priest whin the thing had happened?” 

60 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

“What happened then?” 

Despite myself, despite that spirit of materialism 
in me which I had believed no other spirit could 
subdue, I found myself listening with breath eager 
on my lips, my eyes fixed on his. 

“There came wan out av a pass of the hills and 
down the side av thim, an’ he playin’ on a reed he’d 
cut bi the side av the lake up there in Knockshuna- 
hallion. Didn’t they hear his music an’ he cornin’ 
down the side of the mountain? An’ didn’t the 
thyme blossoms spring up where his feet had trodden 
to look which way was he goin’? An’ he played 
as he came down the side of the hill an’ he with no 
more than a reed to his mouth that he’d cut for 
himself.” 

Malachi paused to turn the quid in his mouth, 
when, fearing lest he might not go on, I asked him 
what sort of music it might have been. 

“ ’Twas the sounds of the winds,” said he, “that 
go slippin’ wid the bees over the heather. ’Twas 
the call of the birds and the music av water that 
drops through the thick av the moss. Shure didn’t 
he laugh as he played and wasn’t his laughin’ like 
the sun shtriking down in the mad race of a shtream? 
An’ there was he cornin’ down the side av the hill 
in his littleen coat, wid the brogues on the feet av 
him as he danced. ’Twas herself heard him and 
stood there like wan in a dream where she was. 
An’ on comes himself an’ she shtandin’ there bi the 
road, wid her head thrown back an’ her throat like 
the neck of a bird that is burstin’ wid song an’ her 
6 1 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


limbs like the saplin’s of ash trees an’ she wid the 
beauty of all women in her face.” 

“What happened then?” 

“Yirra, he came droppin’ the spell of the music 
in her ears an’ she always ready for the dancin’. 
‘I must go,’ says she — ‘I must go,’ says she, an’ 
didn’t she follow the feet a v him up there into the 
mists of the mountains, he playin’ the madness into 
her feet wid his little reed. An’ whin they came 
to the lake, he walks wid his laughter down there 
into the wather an’ she after him suckling for the 
music he played. An’ in she walked an’ in she 
walked, till the black waters closed over her black 
hair and all they found whin they came in search 
av her, was the littleen shawleen floatin’ on the 
water. Doesn’t it hang in the cottage down there 
in Foildarrig and can’t they wring the wather out 
av ut to this day?” 

I sat there in silence when he had made an end, 
wondering what change had come in me that I could 
almost believe his tale. In another place, at an- 
other time, this had been just a story of a romantic 
suicide; but as I listened to it from his lips in that 
little cottage in the mountains, it seemed to have a 
deeper truth than mere narrative. It was this deep- 
er truth, without perhaps his knowing it, that ap- 
peared to give reason for its unswerving belief in 
him. 

What was that truth? Should I ever reach it? 
It was so distant and yet in the very straining I felt 
in my soul to touch it, it seemed that I was coming 
62 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


closer to the understanding of why Anthony Sorel 
had killed Anna Quartermaine. 

There it was, by that very lake, they had found 
him sitting, when two days had gone by after her 
death. 

I looked out of the tiny window of Malachi’s cot- 
tage. The wind had swept clear the sky once more. 
The small oblong of his window showing the sky, 
was like a rough-cut turquoise set in the uneven 
wall. 

“The rain’s past,” said I. 

Without a word he rose from his chair, went to 
the door and opened it so that his chickens might 
get out into the light of the sun again. 

“How many miles is it to the lake from here?” I 
asked. 

He stood there in the doorway looking up to the 
heights of the mountain and his red shirt shouted 
like the blast of a trumpet against that sky. 

“ ’Tis a matter of two miles,” said he- — “an’ ’tis 
the feet av a goat that’ll take ye there.” 

“It’s what’s in a man’s heart,” said I — “you’ll find 
in his feet,” and slipping past him in the doorway I 
set my face up the mountainside. 


CHAPTER VI 


T HE heather grows spare and thin as you climb 
the hills. Above a height there is nothing 
but the coarse mountain grass and the 
moss, with here and there a wild root of creeping 
thyme, falling down like the strands of dark hair 
over the face of the lichened rocks. 

Soon I lost myself in the crevices and ravines of 
the mountains, hollows and gloomy passages, they 
were, that had looked but mere shadows from the 
valley below. From there, I could see nothing of 
the green fields in the lowland around Araglin. The 
sun crept suddenly in places into the gloom, shafts 
of light, as through cathedral windows, across the 
dark spaces of the hills. 

It was a world of great silence, where the slipping 
of a goat over the mountain stones or the cry of a 
buzzard wheeling overhead, set the heart beating in 
every pulse. Here indeed, I could imagine, were the 
great truths to be found. For here it was that Na- 
ture in all the glory of her solitude could speak her 
secrets to the soul of a man. 

Here was the truth which my mind had been 
reaching forth to touch. There it was for my see- 
ing, if but the eyes of my imagination had been 
clear, unmisted by that material vision which is a 
glass, smoked and dim before the sight of the soul. 
6 4 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


But at every moment the loneliness of the place 
encompassed me. I could not see the face of Na- 
ture for the consciousness of my own solitude; and 
yet I felt that I was standing in one of those places 
of the earth where most generously she reveals 
herself. 

With an effort I snatched my mind away from that 
oppressive self-contemplation. I thought of An- 
thony Sorel, living his life, day following night, 
night following day in the long silences of those hills. 
What had he believed? There was abundant evi- 
dence in his poems that that solitude, those dim-lit 
hollows and all the mystery which wrapped them 
round had brought their hidden revelations to his 
soul. 

If I must learn my soul, 

Then, where no feet have trod, 

Give me the speed 
To reach my need, 

And through long days 

But let me gaze 

Into the deep eyes of God. 

So he wrote and I feel sure that then he was speak- 
ing of those very mountain passes; for again, in an- 
other poem, he says : 

I am alone with the sob of the wind, 

The rushes are chanting the wind’s wild song; 

And I hear them say as they drift and bind, 

The voice of God is a silent voice, 

And the patience of God is long. 

65 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


It is ever when he writes of the attributes of God, 
that I feel he is speaking of Nature, both which to 
him were one. 

I took his book out of my pocket then, for I 
brought it with me wherever I went, and read those 
verses and many others beside. For an hour I sat 
there on the table of a great bowlder surrounded by 
the dim light of the gray mists that kept sweeping 
by, until I felt almost that the spirit of Anthony Sorel 
had arisen and entered into me. 

Such gentleness of imagery, such sensitiveness to 
the truths and the beauties of Nature! How, I won- 
dered, could that ever have been flung into the wild 
frenzy of murder and sudden death? The more I 
seemed to achieve understanding of the spirit of the 
man, the more incomprehensible did it become. 

Shutting the volume and putting it back again in 
my pocket, there fell upon my mind the recollection 
of what the old bookseller in Notting Hill had said 
— “Why does a man kill a woman, unless because 
he hates or loves her overmuch.” But as I came to 
my understanding of him, Anthony Sorel was a vi- 
sionary. In all his work, he cried that fact aloud. 
Was it in such a man that love or hatred could be- 
come obsession? I could not conceive the bodily 
passions in him overcoming the purpose of his soul. 
Yet in the portrait I had formed of him within my 
mind, there were always the sensitive lips on which 
kisses would have burnt like coals of fire. 

So I put the book in my pocket and made my way 
still higher up into the mountain in search of that 
66 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


lake where, after those two days, they had found 
him. It was suddenly that I came upon it, hidden 
away in that lofty amphitheater of the hills. 

A chill struck through me as I turned the corner 
of the cliff and found it there before my eyes. The 
black waters were so silent and so still. An almost 
irresistible impulse rushed upon me to cast myself 
down into it and wrench from it the secrets of its 
depths. I stood there trembling. It was no earthly 
place. 

Well indeed could I believe as I stood beside the 
edge, that the faeries had taken Maggie Donovan 
there to her wandering sleep. So earthly a thing as 
suicide could never have been attempted there — the 
very human purpose of it would have shuddered and 
stood still in a swift arrest. Nothing but the unseen 
powers could ever induce a human thing to let those 
inky waters close forever on its head. 

Here was I learning the meaning of the faeries 
swift and fast. They are the symbols of our un- 
traceable moods which no science of psychology in 
the mind of man can ever hope to reveal. 

And there, in those silent mountains, gazing 
“into the deep eyes of God” the moods of a man 
are Nature’s moods; the truths of her are his. 

What indeed must have been the mood of An- 
thony Sorel, when, as I understand, he sat beside that 
awesome lake one day and all one night until they 
found him? So black, so terrible a thing it must 
have been, that I shivered as I thought of the deso- 
lation of it. 


67 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


All down the mountainside from the peaks above 
it, great stones and bowlders had bee.n cast that had 
never reached the water’s edge. How many thou- 
sands, I wondered, had not sped onwards in their 
thundering acceleration and been lost in the fathom- 
less waters. Playthings of the giants they were, 
flung down by mighty hands as boys throw pebbles 
in a stream. 

So ran one’s thoughts in such a place. Giants and 
faeries not only became real, but were the only reali- 
ties. For there it seemed, man was a puny thing. 
As I stood there I was overwhelmed with my own 
insignificance. Strong swimmer as I was, I knew I 
could never trust myself in those still waters; not 
from the belief that currents would suck me down, or 
if it was, it did not speak in those words to my mind. 
The fear that hidden hands would grasp me was that 
which thrust itself upon my thoughts. I peered into 
the water and, in the quivering lights I saw, that 
flashed and faded and then flashed again, could well 
believe they were the hungry eyes of those that lay 
in wait for human things. 

And here it was that they had taken Anthony 
Sorel, in the last moments of his remorse or his de- 
spair. 

I turned away with a sick horror in my mind and 
climbed down the mountain once again. This time 
I went by a different way when, taking the turning 
of a wandering path, I came upon a cottage, roofless, 
windowless, that cried out its lonely desolation to 
the echoes of the hills. 


68 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


I knew at once it must be the place where Anthony 
Sorel had lived, yet scarce anything remained but the 
four walls to show a sign of life. The chimney even 
was shattered, yet there were the marks of the smoke 
on the wall where he had lit his fire. There was the 
gaping window on which doubtless he had often 
leant, looking out across the mists, gazing even from 
there into those “deep eyes of God.” 

All the floor was sprinkled with debris, the brown 
straws of the thatch, the crumbling mortar, the very 
beams that had upheld the thatch. 

In its day it had been such a cottage as Malachi’s, 
one-roomed with a door at back and front. The 
floor was of mud, cracked here and there. 

It was in one crack of the floor, as I looked at it, 
that something glittered and winked as I moved my 
head. It spurred my curiosity. Swiftly I went 
down on my knees and with a pen-knife cut away the 
hard caked earth. 

There lay a ring — a ring of gold, setting an em- 
erald roughly cut. With heart beating at my discov- 
ery, I took it out into the wider light, looking at it 
as one looks at some treasure found in an Egyptian 
prince’s tomb. 

As I turned it over, I saw the letters of an in- 
scription inside the band. Dirt clogged the letters. 
I wetted my finger and rubbed them clear and this 
was what I read: 

“Out of the earth.” 

I read it again and again. What memory was it 

69 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


that it raised in me? Then I remembered — it was a 
phrase, oft repeated in one of Anthony Sorel’s 
poems. 

This incident of the ring I have mentioned be- 
cause, at the time, it brought so near to my mind the 
life of Anthony Sorel in that place, still more the 
death of Anna Quartermaine. For though I was 
never able to confirm my belief that she it was who 
had given it him; though indeed, in all the story that 
I heard from Malachi’s lips, he never mentioned it, 
yet it convinced me then, when I found it, that it had 
played some part between these two whose history is 
now lost amongst the echoes of those Irish hills. 


CHAPTER VII 


A FEW days after my visit to the lake, I 
dropped in one evening, as he had bid me, to 
see Father Dorgan. 

It was a cold night, late in the month of March 
and a fire was burning cheerfully in his parlor. The 
light in the room was pleasant, but dim, for except 
for the light of the fire, starting and dancing on the 
walls and ceiling, only two candles were burning on 
the table between which he had placed the book he 
was reading. 

The housekeeper, an ugly old woman, slightly 
deaf and with a wall eye, had opened the door an- 
nouncing me, and giving him no warning of my com- 
ing. 

At the hall door, we had spent some difficult mo- 
ments over the pronunciation of my name. After 
two or three ineffectual attempts, I had given up 
all hope of her mastering the first part of it and 
had resigned myself to spelling the second part 
alone. 

Even then, with the separate letters carefully 
spelled out by me, she had not grasped it but opened 
the door, announcing “Mr. Thrruston,” with a 
great rolling of “r’s.” 

He looked at me steadily from between the points 
of the lighted candles ; then, suddenly recollecting our 
7i 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


meeting by the bank of the river, he rose and genially 
held out his hand. 

“Good evening, Mr. Thrruston,” said he. 

The vanity which is in all of us and makes it im- 
possible for us to hear the mispronunciation of our 
names compelled me to correct him. I said my 
name clearly and distinctly. 

“Ah — shure, I see,” said he — “Mr. Thrruston — 
ah, of course — what a fool she was.” 

He had pronounced it exactly the same. I let it 
go at that. 

“Well — now would ye like any more light?” he 
went on. “It’s dim in here, a man couldn’t see the 
way to his mouth and I’ll get herself to make us a 
drop of punch.” 

As to the way to my mouth I had nothing to say, 
but for any other account I begged him not to light 
more candles for me. Knowing what was in my 
mind to discuss, I felt that dim, suggestive light was 
far more conducive to his confidence. 

“Oh — we have a lamp,” said he, as though he 
wished me to know that they were not wanting in 
matters of convenience. 

“I’d prefer this light,” I persisted, at which, 
shrugging his shoulders in acknowledgment of the 
fact that I was his guest and must have things to my 
liking, he went in search of the housekeeper to tell 
her about the punch. 

Whilst he was gone, I looked about me. It was a 
high-ceilinged room, unfurnished with any of those 
comfortable luxuries with which you might expect a 
72 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


man to surround himself when he lives alone. And 
yet, it did not want for comfort. The sense that it 
was a haunted house seemed unable to penetrate the 
thick curtains that were drawn before the high win- 
dows. The two sacred pictures on the walls offered 
nothing in the comforting suggestion of decoration, 
yet they gave an atmosphere to the place which you 
felt to be in keeping with the man. 

Things out of keeping in a room, however luxu- 
rious they may be, contribute in no way to the real 
essence of comfort. The body may be at ease, but 
with a restless spirit there can be no repose. The 
restfulness of that room was in the flicker of the fire, 
the two candles burning on the table, the shielding 
curtains shutting out the night and the sense of quiet 
contemplation it all offered to the mind. 

I leant over the table, looking at the book he had 
been reading, still lying open where he had left it. 
There I knew I should more suddenly and closely 
come upon the man of whom as yet I knew so very 
little. 

It was the Bible and it was opened at the book of 
Job. I think I must have smiled, realizing as I did 
that this was no occupation of faith, but the recrea- 
tion of a man who knew the worth of literature and 
knew it at its best. 

I had left the table and was warming my hands 
at the fire when he returned. The first thing he did 
was quietly to close the book, replacing it in the 
bookshelves that stood against the wall. I smiled 
again to myself. So evidently was it literature to 
73 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


him; I have no belief in the Bible that is openly dis- 
played upon a table in any room. It is seldom read. 

He motioned me to a horsehair armchair near 
the fire, seating himself on the chair he had occupied 
before, but turning it round from the table, the bet- 
ter to be able to talk to me. 

“Well,” said he — “how do ye find yeerself in 
Araglin? ’Tis like a peep into the grave after Lon- 
don, I suppose.” 

“It’s quiet enough,” I admitted, “but I didn’t 
come here expecting to find it anything else.” 

“Have ye ever been to Ireland before?” 

I told him how I had lived some years in the South 
and knew it well, though this part of the country was 
new to me. 

To every answer of mine, he kept nodding his 
head, saying, half under his breath, “Indeed — in- 
deed” — a habit he no doubt had acquired from the 
confessional. I had often noticed it in other priests. 
So he continued asking me questions, only pausing 
when the old woman came in with the punch tum- 
blers and all those necessary ingredients for its mak- 
ing. I was quite contented to sit there, answering 
him, knowing that sooner or later, without my forc- 
ing it upon him, he would come upon the purpose of 
my visit to Araglin. While he made the punch, he 
spoke but little. It was an important ceremony, 
needing attention. First the hot water in the tum- 
blers with their little lips. This to bring them to 
the requisite warmth. Then the sugar, melted in a 
wineglassful of steaming water, again a wineglass- 
74 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


ful of whisky, then the shreds of lemon peel cut to 
the thinness of a wafer and last of all the boiling 
water to the brim. From one of the tumblers he 
poured out a wineglassful and handed it to me. 

“That’ll turn March into July,” said he. 

I sipped it and the fumes rose warmly to my nos- 
trils. He watched my face for approval as I drank 
it and there was a smile half-humorous, half of en- 
joyable anticipation in his eyes. 

“Well?” said he. 

“Splendid,” said I — “an excellent antidote for 
winter.” 

“Faith, ye’re right there,” said he. “A man can 
pull the curtains, set a match to the fire till the skin 
of him’s warm, but ’tis this stuff lights the kindling 
inside of him.” 

After the punch-making, he settled down to his 
questioning again, not with that same eagerness of 
curiosity now, but with a genuine interest, finding 
that I was quite ready to tell him all he wanted to 
know. 

When I replied to one of his questions that I was 
a writer, his sharp eyes fixed the more keenly on my 
face. 

“Indeed — indeed,” said he. “I’ve not come 
across the name.” 

I did not think that was likely, even if he had got 
it right. But he said it with a charming air of apol- 
ogy as though it argued an inexcusable ignorance in 
him. However, I quickly exonerated him of that. 

“I can’t expect to penetrate,” said I, “into places 

6 75 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


where people really are alive. Life there would be 
too short for them to dream of reading me. You 
read the right sort of stuff — ” I nodded my head to 
the book he had put away. 

“Ah — there’s some poetry there,” said he and we 
fell to talking upon the decay of poetry, both 
amongst those who read and those who write it. 

“I don’t call it the fault of the poets,” said he. 
“If there’s no beauty about bearing children in the 
mind of a woman she won’t have a beautiful child. 
She will not. Faith, ye might say she’d never have 
a child at all. ’Tis the fault of the people beyond 
over, they don’t want things beautiful and yirra, they 
don’t get ’em. That’s the way with ’em. They don’t 
want children and faith, don’t they go barren? Shure, 
ye can get beauty for nothing but ’tis amusement 
they want and that’s the divil’s expense. Didn’t I 
have to pay five shillings for my seat in a London 
theater to see a lot of painted canvas they called a 
glorious production and couldn’t I see things up in 
these mountains the way the tears ’ud come into me 
eyes to be lookin’ at them an’ I walkin’ there for 
nothing on me two feet. Haven’t we got more poets 
than anything else in this country an’ they, half of 
them, writing in prose the way they’d put bread into 
their mouths. The whole matter with yeer busi- 
ness,” he continued, “is that ye have to live by it. 
Shure if I gave the thrush in my garden a worm for 
every song he sang, wouldn’t he get choked in the 
throat of him? He would so.” 

I must confess it was no little joy to me to sit 

76 

] 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


there listening to this kind of idealism. It voiced 
the instinct which every one of us would obey — if 
we could — if we had the courage. As it is, there 
is scarcely one of us who dare even mention it, so 
conscious are we of the inevitable accusation of folly, 
and of the certain contempt of our fellows. 

But I could say what I liked to him without any 
such fear as this. I could tell things to him — an ut- 
ter stranger — things I would not dare to say — as he 
would have put it — beyond over. 

“An’ is it the way ye’ve come here to get away 
from it all?” he asked me presently. 

I admitted incidentally that that was so. 

“However, I have another more definite reason,” 
said I and out of my pocket I pulled the volume of 
Anthony Sorel’s poems. 

He looked at it long and intently. Then his head 
shot up with a sudden jerk and he looked at me. 

“Where did ye get this?” he asked. 

I told him where I had bought it — how long ago. 

Then he nodded his head backwards and for- 
wards as he gazed at me. 

“What have ye found out from old Malachi?” 
he inquired. 

“Nothing,” said I, for so far my endeavors had 
been fruitless. Whenever I had mentioned the 
name of Anthony Sorel to the old man, and I had 
done so, always in a casual way, every day that I 
had seen him, he had shrunk into himself like a snail 
disturbed upon the garden path. 

“ ’Tis the silence of the dead he has in him,” said 

77 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


he — and then he added, “Yirra, that story’ll never 
be written.” 

“Do you know nothing about it yourself?” I in- 
quired. 

“Nothing but what any people about these parts 
know as well. The unfortunate young man admit- 
ted that he’d killed her.” 

“He did admit it?” 

“He did of course. Shure, wasn’t the blood of her 
on his hands when they found him.” 

“Did he give any reason for killing her?” 

“He did not — divil a word. ’Twas himself keep- 
ing long silences and they hanging him with nothing 
passing his lips from the moment he said he was 
guilty.” 

“I heard he had said something about justice when 
he was being tried.” 

“Oh — he did indeed — ‘Them seek for justice’ — 
’twas himself said it — ‘them seek for justice the way 
they’d hunt for a shillin’ under a stone.’ And there 
was an amount of truth in it mind ye, for I’ve a feel- 
ing in me ’twas not the justice of God they were after 
giving him if a’ be it was the justice of the law. And 
shure — what’s the law, will ye tell me that, and they 
sending Michael Daly to prison because he deserted 
the Army and he sickening to be with the mother 
who’d suckled him from a babe?” 

For a while we both fell to meditation while he 
turned over the pages of the book I had given into 
his hands. 

“Have you read them?” I asked him presently. 

78 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“I have indeed,” he replied. “Didn’t I take a 
copy lor a while from Father Killery in Ballysag- 
gartmore and didn’t he hear all about it from Father 
Nolan, he that was parish priest in the place whin the 
thing happened?” 

“Is Father Nolan alive?” 

I asked it so eagerly and so quickly that he turned 
a smile to me. 

“He is not,” said he. 

I must have shown the bitterness of my disap- 
pointment, for he smiled again. 

“If he were,” continued he, “ye’d learn little 
more than what Father Killery knows, or what I 
know and what plenty round about in these parts 
know as well. They will have it round here, that 
that old man Malachi knows the secret of it; but 
between me and the tumbler of punch there, I 
shouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t know anything 
at all.” 

“You think it was just a common, sordid murder 
then?” 

I know I must have spoken warmly, for the heat 
of my belief was very strong in me. Ever since that 
morning when I had stood beside the lake in the 
mountains, when I had found the ruins of Anthony 
Sorel’s cottage and had discovered that ring in the 
crack of the mud floor, not only had the story be- 
come doubly real to me but a thousand times more 
firmly had grown the conviction in my mind that 
this was no crime of vicious motives. I did not 
willingly incline to the belief that the faeries had 
79 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


taken her; but coming to that realization of what 
the faeries meant, that they were the poetic sym- 
bols of those intangible moods of the mind, which 
no psychologist can either explain or define, I could 
so readily understand how such a belief had grown 
in these credulous children of the mountains. 

For some reason, Anthony Sorel had killed Anna 
Quartermaine, some reason upon which it would be 
beyond any court of law to legislate. So, in his hour 
of trial, he had kept silence rather than be misunder- 
stood and so, out there in the dim mists of the moun- 
tains, the people had seen her walking with the faer- 
ies for want of that understanding which maybe the 
old man, Malachi, was the only one in the world by 
whom it was possessed. 

“Is that what you really think?” I repeated — “that 
the man who could sing the songs he did, was capable 
of the foul and ugly instincts of a common mur- 
derer?” 

“D’ye know what I’d like to be able to think?” 
said he. 

“What?” 

His eyes twinkled — not altogether in humor but 
partly with an intensity of inward light which per- 
haps I never shall be able completely to understand. 

“I’d like to think,” said he, “that she was down 
there, walking the fields with the faeries in Foildar- 
rig, because, mind ye, that young fella could sing a 
song as well as the thrush that sits on the top of the 
thorn bush at the bottom of my garden. And when 
I think of himself taking the knife in his hand and 
80 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


planting it in her, the way his own hands were spurt- 
ed with blood, then all the music goes out of them 
verses to me. I’d sooner hear an owl screeching the 
hoarseness out of itself on a long night than listen 
to one of them poems.” 

“Well — why not think it?” said I eagerly. 
“What harm is there to a man to believe in faeries?” 

He sat staring for a long while into the fire as 
though meditating upon thoughts his mind had sud- 
denly been reawakened to. I would not interrupt 
him, but let him think. At last he looked up at me 
with that same intensity of inward light still in his 
eyes. 

“What would the Bishop say,” he asked, “and 
he hearing that Father Dorgan believed in faeries? 
Shure don’t ye know that the Faith has no call for 
faeries at all? The souls of the departed dead are 
in Purgatory and isn’t that enough for any man to 
be believing?” 

“Yet many of these people round here,” said I, 
“who go regularly to Mass every Sunday, they be- 
lieve in faeries. Would their lives be quite as they 
are, would they be so near to the truth of things, if 
they didn’t?” 

“Ye put great honor on the faeries,” he remarked 
presently. 

“I do,” said I. 

“D’ye believe in them yeerself ?” 

“No — I wish I could. I wish I could reduce my 
mind to that state of simplicity. I can’t. It’s ham- 
pered and choked up by all the thousand disadvan- 
8 1 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

tages of education; like yours is — if you’ll forgive 
my saying so — by religion. I’m not a Protestant; 
you can’t accuse me of party faith; but it seems to 
me that all forms of orthodoxy such as you find in 
religion and in education, they all destroy the free- 
dom that is the only salvation in the soul of a man. 
I’ve no doubt that education teaches the mind to 
think, but not with any freedom ; only on those lines 
which education itself has formulated for one and 
all alike. Scholarship is the whole system, to achieve 
which a man must cram his head with prescribed 
knowledge. But that has no meaning for the free- 
dom of his soul. It’s only because I’ve been brought 
up under that system of education and you in that 
orthodoxy of religion that, failing a belief that the 
faeries took Anna Quartermaine, we can only con- 
ceive of her death as that of a sordid murder. So 
you say that, since you can’t believe she is still walk- 
ing the fields in Foildarrig it drives your mind to 
find no music in any of Anthony Sorel’s poetry. Isn’t 
that slavery of the mind? Aren’t there a million 
tones and colors between white and black — and when 
we talk like that, aren’t we blind to every blessed one 
of them?” 

He straightened himself up in his chair and took 
a sip of his punch. 

“Ye’ve got dangerous talk in ye, young man,” said 
he. “If we all had that freedom of soul, Hell ’ud 
be a queer place and over-full, I’m thinking.” 

“Would it?” I exclaimed. “Can you point a fin- 
ger of accusation at the morals and virtues of these 
82 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

very people of yours who despite your Mass and 
your confessional, still have a freedom of soul which 
not even the power of Rome can take away from 
them? Over in England, we call them superstitious. 
We think of them with minds still wrapped in the 
darkness of superstition. But isn’t it because the 
thing we call progress is no progress at all? All our 
science is engaged in adding a few years to the life 
of the body, as if that mattered when the body must 
die in the end. And so it is that the valuation of life 
has become absurd. The deeper we study Nature 
with instruments and with microscopes, the further 
we get away from her, the more we shrink from 
death. And the more we shrink from death, the 
firmer grows the belief in us that there is no life for 
the soul hereafter. How can a man believe in his 
own soul if he’s so concerned with the life of his 
body? Can a man escape out of prison if he is for- 
ever striving to make unbreakable the chains which 
bind him?” 

Father Dorgan regarded me steadily as though 
the heresy that I spoke must be excused in me be- 
cause I was not of his faith. But added to the mean- 
ing of that glance, or perhaps it was only my fancy, 
I seemed to see a light of envy in his eyes. He had 
wished — so he had said to me — that he could be as 
mad as Malachi, if it would enable him to see the 
things Malachi saw. Now I felt that he wished he 
could be as free in his speech as I. His next question 
almost convinced me that my fancy was not false. 

“What do ye make of the faeries then?” he asked. 

83 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“Symbols,” said I — expressing for the first time 
in words those thoughts that had come to me in the 
mountains — “symbols of all our untraceable moods. 
That’s as far as I’ve got. If I were to live long 
enough in these mountains, perhaps I should become 
simple enough to be able to see them myself. But 
because I’m not, I don’t believe that other people 
don’t see them.” 

“I’ve thought that myself,” said he. “I’ve 
thought they can’t have all this talk in them and they 
seeing nothing at all. But what sort of moods d’ye 
mean ? Shure how can ye have a symbol of a mood ?” 

I seized upon a simile, the first that came haphaz- 
ard to my mind. 

“What do you feel when the mist comes down 
from the mountains?” I asked — “when all day long 
it drips in drops of water from tlft trees all round 
you here and night seems like an abortion, born be- 
fore its time? What do you feel then?” 

“Faith, I feel as if me heart was made of lead 
and I’d take to the grave as soon as look at a man.” 

“Well — isn’t that a mood? And doesn’t the mist 
from the mountains bring it down upon you? And 
in that mood, wouldn’t you do things you wouldn’t 
dream of doing when the sun was up and the sky 
was blue — when God was in his Heaven as Brown- 
ing said? Who’s to judge you for what you do in 
such a mood as that? What brought it? The mist. 
Isn’t that mist then the creator of your mood and 
with but a little effort couldn’t you let your imagina- 
tion stretch forth to see that mist as the breath of 

84 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

some unholy thing that had crept its way down the 
mountainside to poison you? Then wouldn’t that 
unholy thing become the symbol of your mood? And 
when you laugh and when you sing to yourself — and 
when you despair and when you determine — aren’t 
all those moods, coming from such impulses as you 
can never detect? Why not symbols for them all? 
There are good faeries, there are bad faeries, there 
are faeries of death and faeries of life. That’s what 
faeries are — the symbols of all those things in life 
which none of us will ever understand. We teach 
them to our children — less and less it’s true — but 
we never teach them to ourselves, because we think 
that our wisdom of progress can do without them. 
Our study is of the body. But faeries are bodiless 
things. They take shape to themselves, but they are 
all shapes that vanish in the thin air. Why shouldn’t 
Anthony Sorel have killed Anna Quartermaine for a 
reason that neither you nor I can understand? But 
just because it was the body he killed and by the 
body that he must be judged, they set him up there 
to receive justice at the hands of fallible men. 
Twelve men decide upon the facts. As if facts 
count when facts and bodies are the only things that 
die.” 

He got up and stirred the fire. 

“I don’t know that I ought to be talkin’ to ye at 
all,” said he. “Faith, ye’d talk a hen off of her eggs 
— ye would so. But I don’t know that what ye’re 
after saying doesn’t stir up a good many things I’d 
be thinking meself. Mind ye I can’t quite under- 

85 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


stand why a young man like that should be killing a 
woman like herself, unless ’twas the way the wits 
had gone out of him. But there was never said any- 
thing about that at the trial. I do believe they had 
the doctor to him but the doctor found him sane 
enough. And another thing I can’t understand is 
why she came to be dressed in those colleen’s clothes 
an’ she livin’ like a high lady down in a great house 
in Ballysaggartmore.” 

“How much do you know about her?” I inquired. 

“Oh — shure, I know what Father Killery told me 
and he hearing it first hand from Father Nolan what 
went before him. ’Twas Father Nolan knew her 
well. Shure, didn’t he hear herself in confession.” 

“Can you tell me what you know?” 

“Well indeed then, there’s no harm in telling,” 
said he and he drew his chair round before the dying 
fire and told me what he knew. 


CHAPTER VIII 


T HERE’S no doubt,” said he — “she had the 
beauty of all women in her face.” 

This was what Malachi had said of 
Maggie Donovan. It was indeed a saying of the 
people, a simple phrase enough, but full of ex- 
pression as they speak it. 

“She must have been a woman with thirty years 
to her,” he went on presently — “and she living 
in Ballysaggartmore from a child. Her father 
was an Englishman, but her mother was one of 
the Connells of Castle Connell away there in 
County Tipp’rary. ’Twas they could trace their 
names back to the kings of Ireland, and the house 
in Ballysaggartmore belonged to them.” 

“Why did she never marry?” I asked. 

There was the need with him as there was with 
Malachi, to prompt with questions. He was ever 
in danger of drifting into the contemplation of 
his own thoughts. 

“She wasn’t married — was she?” 

He had not answered my first question, where- 
fore I urged him again. 

“She was not,” he replied at last — “and she with 
all the sons of the gentry round making offers 
to her an’ not one of them to her likin’. I’m think- 
in’ ’tis queer she was, she livin’ there all with her- 
87 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


self in that big house. The old man died when 
herself was a slip of a girl and her mother was 
soon after him.” 

“Did she never go away at all — to England or 
abroad?” 

“She did indeed. Every year they’d shut up the 
big house the way ’twould look as if the ghosts had 
brought a bad name to it and away she’d go with all 
them servants sent back to their homes. An’ months 
’ud go by, nobody knowing where her ladyship was, 
till suddenly the train would come into Lismore one 
fine morning and there’d be boxes piled up on the 
platform an’ it steamin’ out of the station. 4 ’Tis 
Anna Quartermaine come back from her jour- 
neys,’ they’d say, an’ shure weren’t they right? 
All the boxes would go up to the house in Bally- 
saggartmore and herself would come back the next 
day. Shure ye’d see the servants lollin’ out of the 
windows and the whole place lookin’ as if it were 
alive again. Oh, indeed there were queer stories 
goin’ about in those days with herself cornin’ back 
after three months’ absence. Wasn’t there one 
man goin’ about the world over, said he’d seen 
herself an’ she walkin’ in the cities of Egypt, the 
way she’d be walkin’ down by the side of the Black- 
water? I dunno, was it true, but Father Nolan 
had the tale to himself from the man who saw 
her.” 

“Well — that’s quite possible,” said I — “many 
people go to Egypt. Thousands go out from Eng- 
land to winter there. But if she traveled as much 

88 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


as all that, how is it she never met anyone to take 
her fancy? She was wealthy — wasn’t she?” 

“Indeed, she’d a power of money,” said he. 

But what might have been a power of money to 
him and all the people over there, may not in 
reality have been so considerable a sum. With 
five hundred pounds a year a girl is an heiress in 
the South of Ireland. There are plenty of offers 
of marriage waiting for her. 

I have seen the house myself in Ballysaggart- 
more, and though in comparison with the houses 
in the neighborhood, it is imposing enough, there 
is nothing in it to suggest that any fabulous amount 
of wealth would have been needed for its up-keep. 
It stands in its own grounds, completely hidden 
from the road, with a little thatched cottage at 
f the lodge gates. There must be thirty acres there 
of fields and garden round the house itself. 

At the time I went there it was unoccupied and 
with a little persuasion on my part, the old woman 
at the lodge showed me over. There were some 
fine rooms in it — one room in particular that faced 
away to the mountains. It was in that room, so 
she told me, that Anna Quartermaine had lavished 
the full expression of that taste there is no doubt 
she possessed. 

“They say ’twas hung wid purple,” said she — 
“the way ye’d think ’twas halfways to the grave.” 

But this I can well believe was exaggeration, 
grown as stories do so swiftly grow, out of the air of 
mystery surrounding her name. All that I gathered 

89 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


from the various accounts I received in Ballysag- 
gartmore, was that she was a woman of keenly 
artistic perceptions and taste — a type of mind which 
I have no doubt was little understood by the people 
with whom she came in contact. 

Things, for instance, have been told me which 
prove to my mind that she was no more peculiar 
than many a woman I have known who likes to be 
surrounded with beautiful things. Yet it was this 
very culture in her which, to the people of Bally- 
saggartmore, appeared to indicate a strangeness of 
temperament they were too gentle in their thoughts 
to call insane. Even Father Dorgan still carried 
the impression in his mind that she was queer. I 
have no such thoughts myself. As I have seen her, 
Anna Quartermaine was an intensely human woman. 

Beautiful she must have been. I see no reason 
to suppose that they exaggerated upon that score. 
The picture I have seen of her bears it out. 

She was tall and nobly made. Her love of the 
country where for miles she walked alone into the 
mountains, must well have added health to her 
beauty. Advanced even in those days, as her taste 
appears to have been, I have found no trace of a 
mind that was abnormal or distorted, as the mind so 
often is, by a cult of beauty. 

Dressed in fitting garments, they say, she would 
often set forth in the morning, a walking-stick in 
her hand, a dog at her heels, turning her face up 
the mountain road and only returning when evening 
had well set in. There is a cottage on the moor- 
90 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


land above Ballyduff where lives an old couple 
who well remember her coming to their door for 
a cup of milk and a piece of griddle bread. This 
seems to have been the only way she took her meals 
when on those journeys. 

“A short skirteen she’d on her,” they told me, 
“an’ she wid the mud on her boots the way 
she might have been liftin’ the praties in the 
fields.” 

This picture, combined with that portrait I saw, 
of a woman dressed so beautifully, even then, that 
one forgot the cruel fashion of the time, gives me 
the impression of an arresting personality. I was 
not concerned with the suggestion of suspicion in 
the voices of those who told me that she made use 
of rouge upon her lips and cheeks. Unknown as 
it may have been in those days for one in her posi- 
tion, I am only the more convinced of that original- 
ity in her which must so deeply have stirred the im- 
pressionable mind of Anthony Sorel. 

Anna Quartermaine was an uncommon woman, 
of that I have no doubt. The very fact of her un- 
married existence alone in that old house is proof 
of it; the sudden tragedy of her death, a greater 
proof than all. But notwithstanding all this, I 
carry no impression of an unnatural creature in my 
mind. As the work of some men is before their 
time, so the temperament of Anna Quartermaine 
must have been in advance of the conditions in 
which she lived. There may be, indeed there are 
many like her to-day; women who refuse the limita- 
7 91 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


tions of the state of matrimony because a wild free- 
dom of imagination in them cannot submit to its 
narrow boundaries. 

Still, remembering Father Dorgan’s statement 
that she was queer, I pressed him further on that 
point. 

“Would you deny women a right to freedom,” 
I asked him, “just because the vast majority of 
them seem to have no particular liking for it? I 
can’t see that there was anything queer about Anna 
Quartermaine. It’s not necessarily queer to be dif- 
ferent from other people. Can’t you conceive a 
woman having such exacting ideals, that she keeps 
herself aloof from marriage rather than sacrifice 
the most vital possession she has for the doubtful 
benefits of convenience?” 

“ ’Tis not natural,” said he with rigid conviction. 
“Shure, if a’ be ’twas natural would she have 
been found up there in the stretch of the heather, 
she with the blood still warm on her breast an’ her 
blind eyes turned up to the stars? She would not. 
For what was there natural in that? ’Twas an un- 
holy passion that brought her to such a pass as 
that. Faith, isn’t that why they hushed up the 
whole affair and she one of the Connells of Castle 
Connell?” 

I leant forward in my chair and stared for long 
into the fire. I felt then that I was on the verge of 
understanding. 

“If you and I could believe in faeries,” said I, 
“we might be capable of the conception of a pas- 
92 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

sion great enough to have passed all question of 
unholiness. It’s her death that makes it unholy to 
us. We think of that which severs life from the 
body and with our valuation of it, can imagine no 
more terrible thing. Why should not a man’s pas- 
sion for a woman, or hers for him, be so tran- 
scendent a thing as that death becomes a little thing 
beside it? Have we lost all the conception of an 
overwhelming and imperishable love such as they 
had in the days of Dante and Beatrice? Was 
death anything to them? Are we such languid, 
weakly creatures now that we cannot rise to such 
heights of passion as are reached in death? You 
think the love — for love there must have been — of 
Anna Quartermaine for Anthony Sorel was an un- 
holy and sensual thing — well, look at this — ” 

I pulled out of my pocket the ring I had found 
in Anthony Sorel’s cottage and laid it on the table 
there before him. 

So evidently had it been a woman’s ring that I 
was prepared to uphold it as a gift from her to 
him. 

“Look at the inscription,” I went on, when I 
had told him how I had come by it. “Look at the 
inscription; engraved on it, so I believe, solely for 
him, when she gave the thing to him. The letters 
are cut, long since the ring was made. The sharp- 
ness of them held the earth. It was with difficulty 
I rubbed them clear.” 

He read it in an uncertain voice. 

“ ‘Out of the earth — ’ ” and then again — “ ‘out 

93 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

of the earth’ — well — what do ye make of that?” 
he asked. 

I opened the book of poems, turning with cer- 
tain fingers to the verses it contained in which that 
very phrase was used. 

“That’s what I make of it,” said I. 

What shall we win, you and I, 

Out of the earth? 

What shall we win, 

If we toil and spin? — 

Will the day draw out 
To a night of doubt 
Ere we win, you and I, 

Out of the earth? 

What shall we win, you and I, 

Out of the earth? 

Where the dew is wet, 

Are there jewels yet 
You never wore? 

Can love yield more 
Ere we win — you and I, 

Out of the earth? 

He laid the book down on the table, placing his 
hand upon the closed cover as though it were a story 
that was ended, a matter past the need of speech. 
For a moment it seemed as if he had nothing fur- 
ther to say, but at last he raised his eyes and looked 
at me. 

“There are so many worlds,” said he enigmat- 
ically. “Shure, how can a man live in them all in one 
lifetime?” 


94 


CHAPTER IX 


T HIS was the first, but not the last of the visits 
I paid to Father Dorgan while I was in 
Araglin. A tentative, half timid desire in 
the man to touch the knowledge of those things his 
faith denied him, was greatly attractive to me. He 
was so fervently a Catholic and yet so drawn, by 
all the Celtic influences within him, to the visionary 
spirit. 

“ Ye’ve got the dangerous speech in ye,” he was 
always saying to me and if indeed there was any- 
thing I might say which ever could be dangerous, 
I felt it was a danger he courted rather than 
feared. 

We might talk of a thousand different things, but 
always the conversation came round to the same 
topic, the death of Anna Quartermaine and how the 
visionary spirit and the freedom of the imagina- 
tion could alter one’s whole aspect of that tragedy 
in the hills. I have known a Catholic priest to 
play with the fire of science, burning the fingers of 
his faith yet ever drawn to it as a child to the 
forbidden fire. It was so with Father Dorgan 
and the subject we so often discussed. 

When he sprinkled the four corners of Power’s 
fields with holy water, it was he assured me as one 
dispensing the blessing of God upon the harvest 
95 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


to come. But Power himself openly confessed to 
me, it was to keep off the evil faeries. 

“Don’t they take the seeds,” said he, “for their 
own harvest and isn’t it the way they put grains of 
sand into the furrows to fool ye — deuce take ’em!” 

I have my suspicions that much of this was in 
Father Dorgan’s mind as well, for one evening he 
said to me, 

“What right have ye to be believing in the 
faeries? Weren’t ye born a Protestant and isn’t 
there English blood in ye to the tips of yeer fin- 
gers?” 

It was almost as though he resented my point 
of view, for no matter how earnestly I assured him 
that I wished my mind were so simple in its atti- 
tude, I think he never really understood how the 
willingness of the spirit to believe could not con- 
quer the impotence of the flesh to see. He has even 
taunted me with seeing these bodiless spirits on 
the mountainside, all in good humor but with, I 
believe, a taint of jealousy in his thoughts. 

From him I learnt a great deal more of Anna 
Quartermaine which must be written when the tale 
comes to be told. Father Nolan it appears had 
known her well and had spoken freely to Father 
Killery, from whom Father Dorgan had gathered 
his facts. 

I do not wish here for one moment to infer that 
any confidence such as he might have learnt in the 
confessional was ever repeated by one priest to the 
other. Had I heard such things, I might indeed 
96 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


have been able to lay bare the very secrets of her 
soul. This information that I gathered and with 
infinite pains, was only from such report as might 
well have been spread about her by one who knew 
her well. And what I heard from Father Dorgan, 
from many another too beside, all the merest scraps 
of history that I could gather together, I have 
knit in one story — the tale of Anthony Sorel and 
Anna Quartermaine. 

Yet without that which I learnt from Malachi, it 
would have been impossible to write. And it was 
Malachi who kept silence longest of all. Day 
after day I visited him up in the hills until he had 
found the ease of speech with me. He would talk 
indeed of a thousand things, but never the subject 
I needed from him most of all. 

Through him my mind became imbued with all 
the grand and passionate simplicity of Irish folk- 
lore. Even though he was so seldom seen by any 
of those who lived in the neighboring villages, yet 
he had a wide reputation as a teller of tales. There 
are many his like in the more remote parts of Ire- 
land. They seem to perpetuate the old spirit of 
the wandering bards, telling their stories in the 
wild poetry of prose and always concluding their 
narratives with the simple finality, “That is my 
story.” 

Malachi never told his stories twice in the same 
way. I learnt by that, for I heard many of them 
again and again, how much he brought his imagi- 
nation to bear upon the telling of them. Their 
97 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


substance seldom differed; it was the details that 
changed. There was one story of a great lady in 
Connemara that he told me three separate times, 
and every time he dressed her in different garments, 
calling upon the beauties of Nature for his like- 
nesses, and each time his descriptions became more 
wonderful in their poetic conception. 

This drawing upon Nature for his ceaseless need 
of imagery was characteristic of all the tales he 
told. As he had said of Maggie Donovan, “She 
was as beautiful as a blackthorn bush on a long 
Spring day,” so he gave pictorially from Nature 
in every story he related to me. 

I remember well his description of the great lady 
in Connemara — “She rose from her chair,” said 
he, wishing to give me the impression of the great- 
ness of her anger — “she rose from her chair, like 
a cloud going up into the mountains, and haven’t 
I seen sparks out av the hoofs av gallopin’ horses 
would have died black out beside the light in her 
eyes.” 

Well could a book be made out of the stories I 
had from Malachi, those long days in his little cot- 
tage under the shadow of Knockshunahallion. But 
the story I so eagerly waited for him to tell me, 
of that I heard nothing. 

Whenever I mentioned the name of Anthony 
Sorel, or spoke of Anna Quartermaine, the lids 
of his eyes tightened the one upon the other. His 
withered skin puckered into a thousand wrinkles 
and the whole mentality of him seemed to shrink 
98 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


to nothingness before me. He never definitely told 
me that he would not speak of it, for words were 
not needed from him then. He became like a book 
that is sealed and locked upon the lectern. Its 
pages were no longer open for me to read and 
usually, when it came to this, he would speak but 
little upon any subject, withdrawing his mind into 
that silent contemplation from which it was im- 
possible to distract him. 

One day I found him seated over his fire, racked 
with a cold and struggling to get the warmth into 
him. 

He spoke despairingly of death, a subject he 
often talked about but never with such melancholy 
as then. 

“Won’t ut be cornin’ on me,” said he, “in the 
black of the night and I like an old tree beaten by 
the wind alone up here in the mountains? Yirra — 
God be wid the days, for the days are long and ’tis 
mighty little comfort a pore man like meself would 
be gettin’ out av them. Who will there be to lay 
me out and I slippin’ out av the world wid no priest 
to put his hands on me? O Almighty God, what 
would a man be doin’ in the darkness when the 
light av the day is gone?” 

So he talked, rocking himself to and fro, his 
mind wrestling with the fatalism of death. 

“You want a little spirit,” said I, “to get the 
blood warm in your veins — then you won’t be think- 
ing so much about dying.” 

“Is ut whisky ye mane?” he asked. 

99 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


I nodded my head. 

“An’ where would I be gettin’ the spirit from?” 
he asked me. “Isn’t the price of a bottle of that 
stuff what would keep me here in this cottage till 
to-morrow was a month?” 

“You haven’t got any in the place?” 

“I have not. Wouldn’t I be drinkin’ it now the 
way a cat ’ud lap milk out of a saucer?” 

“I’ll go down to Araglin now, at once,” said I, 
“and get you some.” 

“Six miles?” said he. 

“Well — I’ll be back in an hour and a half. Put 
something round your shoulders and sit tight into 
the fire. It’s going to be a bitter night. You’ll 
want all the warmth you can get.” 

He was gazing up at me in wonder, scarcely be- 
lieving yet that I was going to do this thing for 
him. But when I went to the door, he realized that 
I was in earnest. 

“May the blessin’ of God Almighty rest on ye,” 
said he, “and may all the hairs in yeer head turn 
into mold candles to light yeer soul to glory on 
the last day.” 

With that blessing ringing in my ears, I closed 
the door behind me and set out in the driving rain 
down the mountain road to Araglin. 


CHAPTER X 


A S long as I live, I shall remember that night, 
not only when I climbed back up the moun- 
tain road, with the rain washing in tor- 
rents down the gutters it made for itself, but all 
the long hours afterwards till dawn. Yet they 
were not long hours to me. Never indeed will the 
hours of a night without sleep pass so swiftly by 
for me again. 

It was after six o’clock when I started back from 
Foley’s public-house with the black bottle of whisky 
under my arm. The daylight was vanishing then 
in rents of orange across a sky of sullen gray. All 
of the men in the bar parlor of the inn told me it 
would be a fearsome night. If the mists came up, 
they warned me, I might lose my way when I re- 
turned. But I had made the journey so often I 
had no fear of that. 

As I climbed the mountain road with its loose 
stone wall on either side, where rock plants grew 
in company with numberless Irish ferns and harts- 
tongues thrusting^ their leaves out of the crevices, 
I could hear the murmur of the wind rising away 
across the mountains to the west. It was like 
the cry of men far off in battle; men striving against 
the power of men in mighty anger. Malachi would 
have told me it was the voices of the hosts of the 


IOI 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


Sidhe as they sweep in their thousands down the 
passes of the untrodden hills. 

I realized then how surely I was coming under 
the influence of these mountain visionaries, for 
every sound I heard, conveyed in the heart of it 
the likeness to some human note. A curlew cried 
across the moorland and it fell on my ears like the 
lonely cry of a child. And what child, they would 
have argued, could have found its way into the 
silences of those hills at such an hour? Then, as 
they reached their humble firesides, they would have 
told how the faerie children had been crying in the 
blackness of the storm. The very sound of it would 
have urged a speed into their feet as they toiled 
homewards. With the loneliness of that crying 
coming over me, I found myself quickening my 
own. 

As I climbed over the wall of the road to reach 
the rough path through the heather, a donkey gath- 
ered itself hastily to its feet and hurried away with 
ears laid back into the darkness. My heart for- 
got its beating and then with a sudden leap in my 
breast, drove the hot blood burning to my cheeks. 
After a moment, I stumbled on, falling again and 
again over the roots of the heather, feeling the 
distance to be never so long as then, in the gloomy 
darkness of the over-riding night. 

For seldom have I felt such desolation before. 
The deep gray moors and rising mountains stretched 
out around me like a deserted continent. Never a 
light was there, no sign of life but the wildest. The 
102 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


beating of an owl’s wings as it flew by me, its 
mournful cry dying away into the distance of the 
hills, was like the cry of a soul that is lost be- 
tween the gulf of the worlds. 

And all the time as I walked, my mind would 
picture for me that lake up in the hollow of the 
mountains, where, as Malachi had said, at night 
time, the souls of those the faeries have taken 
“do be flyin’ in crooked circles with the bats in 
the shadows of the hills.” 

I struggled not to think of it, for those black 
waters and ghostly echoing cliffs forced themselves 
in an impenetrable depression on my mind. My 
solitude in the midst of Nature bore down upon 
me then. I thought of a line from one of Anthony 
Sorel’s poems, so clearly expressing that utter 
melancholy which besets one: 

When the earth is chill and one human stave 
Of music would bring men from the grave. 

He must have known those moments of solitude 
when he wrote that, such solitude I felt stealing 
through my flesh then as I made my way up into 
the mountains. 

A fresh hope sprang up in me when I saw the 
flicker of light in Malachi’s cottage. For the 
moment, that was all I needed. The thought of 
my return I could put aside with the exquisite re- 
lief that sight of human habitation brought to me. 
Perhaps I could put it away the more easily, for 
103 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


in my bones was the sensation that I was not going 
to return that night. 

I did not return. But little did I think of the 
thing that would detain me. 

There was yet the best part of a mile to be 
walked before I could reach his door, but the 
warm flicker of that light put fresh heart into me. 
When a black dog slunk by me, quitting the path 
it was following and crouching past across the 
heather, it struck no note of fear in my mind. The 
poor beast was so apprehensive of ill-treatment at 
my hands that I stood for a moment to watch it, 
creeping away there into the darkness. It had given 
me a wide berth, cowering low to the earth with 
swift glances over its shoulder. Only when it was 
some distance past me did it return to the little 
beaten path through the heather. I whistled to it. 
You must know the loneliness and fear of a dog 
that is lost, what a piteous thing it is. In the 
belief that the kindness of a human voice can give 
them courage, a man must stop, no matter the night, 
no matter the weariness of his way. 

I called to it, but it never paused in the direction 
it was going. A moment or so I watched it when 
at last it had faded away into the blackness of the 
night and I continued my way, thinking of the 
strange loneliness of that thing which God had 
made alive and how bitter a place for it the world 
must be on such a thankless night. 

When I was within a quarter of a mile of 
Malachi’s cottage, the clouds blew over, leaving a 
104 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


rent in the heavens as brilliant as black ice, from 
which the stars shone forth cold and clear, the one 
jeweled piece in that somber raiment of the sky. 
That clearing was not of long duration. In great 
folds of lightless, seamless gray, the heavy clouds 
swept on, with just this tear in the murky garment 
through which an instant later the light of the 
moon shot out. For that instant the wide stretches 
of heather, the broken boundary walls, the narrow 
passes between the hills and the uplifted moun- 
tains were all washed white in moonshine. From 
a place of gloomy foreboding, the wold had sud- 
denly become one of passionate emotion. I gazed 
about me as one standing in a darkened gallery 
in whose hand, unawares, a flaming torch has been 
thrust. The earth glittered with light; it dazzled 
me. Before I could realize it all, the torch in 
my hand had flared, the rent was mended in the 
garment, the clouds had closed over the moon. I 
was in utter darkness once again with just the pin- 
prick of that orange light winking at me from the 
window of Malachi’s cottage. 

I did not wait to knock upon the door, but just 
entered, once my fingers had found the latch. The 
rain was beginning to fall again and my clothes al- 
ready were well drenched by it. 

He was sitting there over the fire as I had left 
him, crumpled up with his knees against his chest, 
neither did he move from where he was, nor raise 
his head as I entered. 

I closed the door and shut out the wind and rain 
105 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


behind me. I took off my coat and shook it before 
the fire. The rain flung from it hissing and spit- 
ting into the flames. Still he did not move. 

“Do you feel any better?” I asked. 

He moaned under his breath and I knew that 
the sickness of life was still with him. Then I 
searched the dresser for a cup, pouring some whisky 
into it and filling it with water from an old earthen- 
ware pitcher on the floor. There he kept the water 
he drew every morning from the spring that bub- 
bled through the heather. 

“Take a little of this,” said I. “Drink it all down 
— the whole lot of it if you can.” 

His teeth chattered against the rim of the cup 
as he put it to his lips. Yet even before it was 
finished, it seemed his hand was steadier. Then 
he put his hand in his pocket and brought out a 
piece of dillisk — a seaweed they dry and bring up 
from the coast, selling it through the country. This 
he began chewing as though it were a quid of to- 
bacco, his jaws working round and round like a 
cow chewing the cud. 

It is hard to say what satisfaction they get out 
of this habit, for dillisk is like leather in the mouth 
and, to my unaccustomed palate, brought only the 
taste of the brine. 

However the mere fact of him stirring himself 
to this extent, showed me that the spirit had taken 
its effect. He still had no inclination to talk and 
when a little later the storm broke in its full fury 
outside, the windows rattling and the old doors 
106 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


straining on their hinges as though some wild beast 
were trying to force an entrance, then he fell to 
shivering again and began once more to lament 
upon the loneliness of death. 

I took the bottle off the floor and extracted the 
cork. He saw the movement and his eyes shot 
quickly out from the deep hollows where they lay. 

“Is ut the way ye’ve got more of that stuff in 
there?” said he. 

I told him the bottle was full, except for the 
quantity I had already given him. He looked at 
me, silently for a moment and in wonder. 

“Glory be to God!” said he presently. “Didn’t 
ye pay a power of money for that?” 

I told him how much it cost, at which he raised 
his eyes above him, staring for a while at the rafters 
below the thatch. 

“Is it the way ye spent all that silver money to 
get me a drop that ’ud warm the blood in me and 
ye walking all the ways through the storm of the 
night?” 

He could scarcely believe that any human being 
could be so generous. It was not so much the jour- 
ney I had made, for he merely added that as an 
afterthought. It was the spending of the money 
that seemed such a noble act to him, whereas, if 
I took any credit to myself, it was for walk- 
ing that distance, as he said, in the storm of the 
night. 

“Well — may the Almighty God heap blessin’s on 
ye,” said he, when at last he realized that the bottle 
8 107 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


was full and meant for him. “May the Almighty 
God send ye the power of good fortune and may 
ye walk in the land wid health and happiness on 
ye and all that belong to ye to the last day. Will 
ye pass the bottle across to me now, the way I 
can be helpin’ meself when the sharp of that wind 
there gets into me blood?” 

I swear I saw no harm in it. I swear that at 
that moment no thought of what Father Dorgan 
had said about him when he had drink taken, ever 
entered my mind. If he could get no warmth from 
his blood or from the fire that burned at his feet, 
it was artificial warmth that he needed. I handed 
the bottle across to him and he placed it down on 
the floor by his side. 

I can remember now, as the recollection of that 
night comes back to me, how there were many 
things that he asked me to do about the room. One 
of the panes of glass in the window was broken, 
the rain came spitting through the jagged aperture. 
He asked me to put back the wad of brown paper 
which had been jammed there to keep out the 
draught. He asked me to count the chickens under 
the hatch of the old dresser, for that he believed one 
of them had strayed and was out, as he said, “in 
the black whirl of the storm.” 

There were other things he pressed me to do 
for him and during all these moments of my oc- 
cupation, he must have been filling his old cracked 
cup with the whisky I had brought from Foley’s 
public-house. However it was, in half-an-hour he 
108 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


was a different being. There needed no incentive 
from me to give him speech. He launched forth 
into the wildest extravagance of exhaustless nar- 
rative — tales of the faeries, of the strange happen- 
ings to men and women in those glens and val- 
leys of the hills. 

Never shall I remember them all; but the dim 
impression of their wild poetry remains with me 
now. Phrases of speech, instinct with an unfet- 
tered imagination, fell unhesitating from his lips. 
I can see his wrinkled face now as he sat there in 
the faint, warm light of the peat fire, while the 
storm outside rushed madly like some hunted thing 
through the hollows of the mountains. It was as 
the sound of a million men stampeding in the de- 
feat of battle. At times, when the wind shrieked 
and howled through the faulty crevices of the doors, 
I heard as it were the crying of their voices in 
terror as they rushed ceaselessly by. 

And there he sat, sometimes rocking himself to 
and fro as if to give measure to the monotony of 
his voice, his little eyes lit with unnatural flames, 
talking, endlessly telling his tales of the world, al- 
most as though my existence was not conscious to 
his thoughts. 

Then suddenly at the conclusion of a story he 
had related about that lake in the far hollows of 
Knockshunahallion, he looked across the red light 
of the fire at me and filled the cracked cup again. 

“ ’Twas bi the edge of thim waters, they laid 
the hands on the young fella, an’ he with the black 
109 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

heart in him an’ his eyes struck wid the desolations 
of the world.” 

It was Anthony Sorel he meant and this was the 
first time of his own account he had spoken of 
him. 

I claim no indulgence for the thing I did, beyond 
the fact that at the moment I knew nothing of that 
empty bottle at his feet. It is excuse or no excuse, 
according to those who judge me, that I was so 
eager for the truth. But once he had spoken of 
Anthony Sorel of his own free will, then, controlling 
my eagerness, acting the lie that I did not care 
whether I heard it or not, I encouraged him to tell 
me more. 

He was slow to begin, but when he had drunk 
more from the cracked cup in his hand, it was at 
last that he gave himself up to the pride of his 
story. 

“ ’Twill be the Almighty God and He judging 
him whin the hosts do be blowin’ their trumpets on 
the last day.” 

It was with these words that he ushered in his 
tale and there, in that wind-swept cottage in the 
mountains, with the storm hissing in the thatch and 
the raindrops spitting into the peat fire, till the 
long hours of night were treading on the heels of 
dawn, he told me the story of Anthony Sorel and 
Anna Quartermaine. 


PART II 


CHAPTER I 

T HERE came one day a young man to Arag- 
lin, from some foreign place, so the people 
said, and he paid money down to Michael 
Quinn for Heggarty’s cottage that had stood empty 
on the edges of Knockshunahallion ever since old 
Heggarty had died. 

They talked of the wits having gone out of him 
and he paying good money for that hovel of a 
place, but Michael Quinn pocketed the gold and 
was known to have said, 

“There are as many shillin’s in a gold coin that 
comes out av an old sow’s mouth as a man ’ud be 
findin’ in the mint itself.” 

Who could deny the truth of that? But one and 
all, they declared he had got a great bargain for 
himself and there is no doubt he had. 

The only expense to the vendor was the cost of 
a new thatching, part of the bargain entered into 
and drawn out by Quinn on a piece of paper he 
got from Jim Keane, the publican then in Araglin. 
For no sooner was the matter verbally agreed upon, 
than Quinn, who had once been involved in legal 
proceedings at the petty sessions court in Fer- 
iii 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


moy, made eagerly to get the substance in writing, 
though he had never heard of an official stamp 
in his life. 

The business was then concluded and a drop of 
bad whisky drunk by Quinn on the strength of it 
when once he had scratched his name across the 
piece of paper, well soiled by the exertions of his 
legal propensities. 

“By this accordingly — ” so the document was 
worded — “Michael Quinn agrees to hand over the 
cottage in the grip of the hills that was after being 
old Heggarty } s cottage and will do the same , having 
put a new thatch to it the way it will keep out the 
drift of the rain, for the sum of ten pounds which 
no man can say is not a fair price.” 

It is interesting to see how the legal tone of the 
agreement quickly loses its flavor and falls away 
into the more human measure of speech. It is still 
more interesting to observe that last little touch 
of a pricking conscience, as though he anticipated 
the whole world’s criticism of his bargain and would 
have it in writing that he had dealt fairly by his 
man, however much they might declare in those 
parts to the contrary. 

At the foot of this document, he scrawled his 
name, Michael Quinn, while below it, you will 
find the name, Anthony Sorel, in tiny letters that 
would need almost a magnifying glass to decipher 
them. 

“ ’Twas himself didn’t want the world to be 
knowin’ he’d put his name to a dirty bargain,” they 
1 12 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


said in Araglin when they saw the signature. 
Michael Quinn could answer nothing to that. 

But if they supposed that Anthony Sorel thought 
he had made a bad settlement, they were much mis- 
taken. He bought some little furniture in Fer- 
moy and settled himself down in this thatched cabin 
in the heart of the mountains, much as a man who, 
long riding the stretches of the implacable sea, 
comes before the Winter storms into the peace of 
the harbor. 

It was the month of November when he came 
and the winds of God were seeking out the moun- 
tain crevices and the clouds were wrapping the 
passes of Knockshunahallion in a seamless garment 
of gray. The nights were falling quickly with im- 
penetrable darkness. Even the sea-gulls came in- 
land so far to haven from the Atlantic storms. In 
the daytime, far down in the valleys, they could 
be seen like fluttering pieces of whitest paper blown 
in the wake of the plowman’s team. 

There was not one amongst the people of those 
parts but who believed that Anthony Sorel would 
be gone from his cabin before the Winter was past. 

“Is it stay up there in the wrath of the moun- 
tains,” they said — “an’ he havin’ the white of death 
already in his face?” 

That was what they said, but they were all wrong. 
An unearthly pallor there may have been in his 
cheeks when first he came to Knockshunahallion, 
but it was not the whiteness of death. There was 
an eager virility in that slim body of Anthony 
ii 3 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


Sorel’s which none of them had taken into account. 

When even a month had gone by, the mountain 
winds had burnt a faint color into his face, bur- 
nished a brighter light in his eyes. Those who met 
him then, tramping the half-trodden paths through 
the heather, would scarcely have believed him to 
be the same man when once the old year had shot 
its bolt and the new year had lifted the latch. 

Twice every week he came down those four miles 
into the village to buy food, bread and butter and 
tea; sometimes fish when the men came out in their 
little rail carts from the coast. In the stony piece 
of land that was tilled behind his cottage, he said, 
he was going to sow his own potatoes in the Spring. 

It was the postman, bringing the letters — a lone- 
some walk, those three miles over the moors from 
Bally duff — who first told the people that Anthony 
Sorel was one of those who made songs and had 
the beauties of the world in the tips of his fingers. 
They never said any more after that about the Win- 
ter driving him out of the mountains, because they 
knew that a man who made songs and could see 
the beauty of the world, would find such beauties 
in those hills as that he could never wish to leave 
them. 

It was in time, when the Spring was coming 
round, when the first buds of the mountain ashes 
were faintly brushed with green 2nd the larks rose 
in sudden upward flights out of the heather, such 
time as that it was when people about began to 
have some awe and great respect for him. And 
114 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


as the months went by, there were men in the cot- 
tages who could say his poems off by heart. 

They knew him all about; for lonely though he 
was up there in that cabin of his in the grip of 
the hills, he would come down to the quiet farms 
and to the cottages that lie in the valleys, as the 
toys of a child lie in a woman’s lap, and there he 
would sit with them, talking at their firesides. 

All the folk-lore and the tales of the faeries’ en- 
chantment, he heard in this way from the people 
themselves. Much of the poetry he wrote came 
first from their lips. 

It was when they waked Mary Dorgan, that 
black night in March, he first read one of his poems, 
as they sat about the room with the coffin lonely 
on the table and the two candles burning with 
shrouds of wax at her feet. 

There was a strange note of remoteness in his 
voice as he read. He allowed himself but little 
variety of intonation, and yet the tone of it w r as 
sweet, in brighter moments like the running of a 
mountain stream under the moss, in solemn cadences 
as the wind that threatens the hills before even the 
storm is near. He read for the beauty of the 
words alone and would not distract the ear with 
that emotional appeal of the actor to the senses. 

“Catch up the garments of your night 
Embroidered with its stars, 

And look not neither to the left nor right, 

Nor heed the flaming scimitars. 

ii 5 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


Set out with quiet feet and noble heart; 

Death has commanded you shall take your part. 

Pluck you a thorned hazel twig 
And shake the blossoms free; 

The very hour itself is big 
With your soul’s destiny. 

Girdle your faith and be as fifty men 
That march to battle in the hollow glen. 

Bring you no tears, the dew will fall 
To wet the path you go; 

And you will hear the curlews call 
Across the moors below. 

The flame-flies shall burn candles in the grass 
To light your silent footsteps as you pass.” 

There is much honor for that man in Ireland 
who can make songs. So from amongst the people 
there, who lived in the sight of Knockshunahallion, 
there came great honor to Anthony Sorel. Wher- 
ever he went, there was a welcome for him — a cup 
of milk, a piece of griddle bread, a seat by the 
peat fire. And as time went by, the reverence of 
mystery grew about his name. 

‘‘We’ve a mystery man up there in the moun- 
tains,” they said, “an’ he singin’ his songs through 
the watch of the night.” 

No one knew how he lived. In time, no one 
asked. Once every month, he walked the long road 
across the moors into Ballyduff, took the train to 
Lismore but was not seen there by the townspeople, 
i'i 6 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


except when he arrived and, after three days, when 
he returned. But in Lismore itself, he wasted no 
moment, was come there and was gone; was come 
again and then again returned to Ballyduff, from 
whence he walked back over the windy moors to his 
cabin in the mountains. 

Some supposed him rich — some poor. None of 
them knew. Even when Shauneen Troy climbed 
up into the mountains, one of those days when 
Anthony Sorel had gone away, and peered in 
through the window of his cottage, he learnt but 
little for his daring to tell them down in the val- 
ley below. 

There was the old bed built into the wall, just 
as Heggarty had died in it — “But weren’t the 
clothes on it white,” said Shauneen — “the way he 
might have stole the cloth off the altar; an’ wasn’t 
there a robe over it all of the colors of the world, 
the Pope might have on his shoulders an’ he sittin’ 
on the holy chair of Rome itself?” 

Quite possibly this was a patchwork quilt cast 
over the bed and likely to bring great wonder to 
strange eyes that had never seen its like before. 
Shauneen made the most of it, for he had no other 
news to tell. The light from that little window had 
but faint power to illuminate the room within. He 
could not see how simple the furniture in the place 
might be, so he colored everything with the light 
of the patchwork quilt, speaking of great chairs 
that kings might sit in and twenty high candlesticks 
of polished brass when he had seen but two. 

117 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


The only thing, a Russian crucifix, set with 
all the barbarous beauty of rough-cut stones, 
a thing he might have talked about with 
bated breath, he caught no sight of. It stood in 
a niche of the wall by the open chimney and 
none besides Anna Quartermaine ever beheld it 
there. 

Here then and in this fashion, Anthony Sorel 
lived in the lonesomeness of the hills while a year 
drew by. There was no more heard of his fear- 
ing the wrath of the mountains after that and no 
longer did they talk of the white of death in his 
face. 

By many gentle things, he endeared himself to 
those about him. When old James Cotter was 
thrown from his horse on the Clogheen road, it 
was Anthony Sorel himself who sat by his bed- 
side while two days were going in and out and 
but for him, they said, the old man would have 
got his death at that time. 

Yet notwithstanding all his familiarity with the 
people, there never departed from him that sense 
of mystery. Often when the heavy dews were fall- 
ing and the long evenings of the summer were -drop- 
ping into night, a herdsman late coming from his 
flocks in the hills, would find Anthony Sorel walk- 
ing alone, long distances from his cabin on Knock- 
shunahallion. Because of the songs he made, per- 
haps, too because of his solitary life up there in 
the mountains, they said he talked with the faeries. 
They whispered that he had some spell against 
1 1 8 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


their charms by which none of them could take him 
to themselves. 

So he lived, close against the face of Nature, till 
one Spring had gone by and yet another Spring 
with its racing clouds and bursts of sunshine was 
dressing the mountains in their purple robes. Then 
again the air was filled with the beating of birds’ 
wings and the hum of bees. Up into the heavens 
the larks soared, bearing the burden of their quiver- 
ing music into the clearer light. The stone-chats set 
about their building under the mountain stones. 
All day long rose the far, faint bleating of the 
mountain sheep, calling their errant young. The 
Winter mists were swept away; the valleys stretched 
out their arms to the awakening sun once more and 
then it was that Anthony Sorel first met Anna 
Quartermaine. 


CHAPTER II 


O FTEN, with sly laughter, like children cun- 
ning in their ways, the old folk teased 
Anthony Sorel because he lived alone in his 
cabin up in the mountains. 

“One fine day,” they said, “ ’tis yourself will be 
takin’ a shtrapping young girrl up there to the moun- 
tains, and ye makin’ the songs to her through the 
long nights. Shure, wouldn’t ye be as mean as bog- 
water, keepin’ that bed to yeerself with all the young 
men about gone foreign and not one but yeerself 
to marry a dacint girrl that ’ud be lookin’ sideways 
at any young fella walkin’ the roads.” 

At the cross roads indeed, whenever a fiddler 
came those ways and they would be dancing till 
the night was dark, there was many a young girl 
casting her daring eyes at Anthony Sorel while 
he stood by the loose stone wall watching them. 
Was it not he who could make the songs of the 
mountains and is there not in the breast of every 
woman some voice that calls her to the singers of 
the world? 

Indeed a woman may well and fondly love the 
man who woos her with the light of battle in his 
eyes, who wins her with the strength of victory in 
his arms. Like a mother she will dress his wounds 
and bathe his forehead with her tears. Then it is 


120 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


as to a child she gives her love, knowing that, as 
a child, to just one word of hers he will obey. 

But it is the man of dreams, of unknown pas- 
sions and mysterious moods, to whom for deeper 
sorrow or for greater joy she gives the secret of 
her soul. His songs can waken her to unsuspected 
depths; his hidden thoughts are always riddles for 
her watching eyes. She never knows the man he 
may not be and never can with all enchantments 
wholly enslave his mind. He is no child, obedient 
to her voice, but with some strange elusiveness al- 
ways evades her when she thinks to hold him fast. 
And so because it is not easy victory she asks, this 
is the man whose eye arrests hers in a world of 
men. 

Perhaps it is the priest in him, vowed celibate 
against the flesh, that urges on the conflict in her 
soul. She questions the youth and beauty in her 
face that cannot bring him pleading to her feet 
and seeks to gain from him the very passions that 
she scorns in coarser men. That strange aloofness 
in his eyes, spurs on her spirit to the sterner quest. 
It is the marble that her blood would warm, 
towards which her nature leans to kindle the fire 
of life. 

In all unconsciousness no doubt, yet still in such 
a mind, the young girls glanced at Anthony Sorel 
when they saw him at the cross ways, or met him 
walking by the road. The death of Maggie Dono- 
van in the mountain lake was told at night about 
their firesides and many a one of them could see 
1 2 I 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


in Anthony Sorel, him that came down the heather 
path, playing the sound of the winds in the reed 
between his lips. And not one alone, but many 
as they lay awake in the darkness would find imagi- 
nation to believe that such a death could bring its 
joys to them. 

Yet he looked at none but with the eyes that see 
beyond, until it grew to be much spoken of that 
he had visions coming to his sight; that in his cabin 
where the winds meet in the hills, he could call forth 
the souls of the departed dead and hear their mes- 
sages from the other world. 

Amongst such a people as those in Ireland, with 
all the riot of their imagination running wild, it 
is not difficult to understand how legend and mys- 
terious tales should gather about such a man. And 
yet he moved amongst them, reading his songs at 
their humble firesides, listening to their stories of 
the faeries, and all in that lonely simplicity of life 
it seemed so strange a man should choose for his 
expression. 

It was in the Spring of his second year on Knock- 
shunahallion that Anna Quartermaine came out of 
Ballysaggartmore, walking up into the mountains. 
She went by the road that passes through Feagar- 
rid, swinging her body to a tireless step as she 
walked, with Michael, an Irish terrier, trotting at 
her heels. 

An open eye and clear she had for the beauties 
of the world that stretched before her. There was 
not a lark that rose or a curlew that called but 


122 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


what her eyes had seen, her ear had heard. Sport 
there was too for that devil Michael when once 
they came to the moors. She carried a whip in 
her hand, but it was her voice that brought him 
in to heel. 

When at Foildarrig, she left the road and set 
across the moors to join the road again past Doon. 
Then she unpinned the hat from her head and let 
the winds of that Spring morning blow their scent 
of heather through her hair. 

So she was walking, humming that music of a 
heart glad of the day, when she first met Anthony 
Sorel. 

He was lying out on a flat table of rock, his 
elbows raised on it, supporting his face in his hands. 
Below him stretched the theater of the hills and 
all the valley with its patchwork fields of luminous 
green. 

There was a murmur of life in the heather; 
there was the first sharp warmth of Spring in the 
sun. It was a day for lovers in that magic world 
and yet, when Michael stood with his front paws 
raised upon the rock in eager curiosity, the man 
looked at the dog and not at her. 

She called him back to her heels as she passed, 
knowing, as women do, without observing, that she 
had pitched her voice upon its sweetest note. Then 
it was he looked, as she had meant he should, when 
in his eyes she saw that far aloofness which only 
could explain his presence in so wild a world alone. 

On his head too there was no covering. His 
9 123 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


black hair was blown, disordered on his forehead, 
and he lying there like a man at rest at the noon 
of the day. She looked for that satchel on the 
shoulder, proving him one of those strange pedes- 
trians you meet the world over, who seem from 
choice to face the road alone. But there was none. 
Realizing that he was no man of those parts, not- 
withstanding the untidy condition of his clothes, 
there was yet the suggestion to her mind as she 
glanced at him that he was no stranger to that 
corner of the world. 

These are the instincts, and God knows how, that 
lead a woman to the truth. Was it the attitude in 
which he lay, the easy posture of his slim figure? 
She would have been the first to swear she did not 
know how she came by that conviction. A convic- 
tion it was; for when she had passed out of sight 
round a bend of the hills, she too seated herself 
in such position as that if he left his table rock 
she could observe which way he went. This was 
curiosity; that spirit that stirs within a woman long 
time before she knows she is awake. 

Well into an hour she sat there wondering would 
he ever go and then, when at last her patience was 
exhausted, with sudden impulse she retraced her 
steps. It was not that she knew what she was 
going to do. Women do not know, do not set their 
minds to this or that, or if they should, are never 
prepared to do it. 

When once again she turned the corner and 
found him still lying on his table rock, there rose 
124 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


conviction, now doubly sure, he was no man of 
those parts. But had he shown the wish to speak, 
then there had been no echoing wish in her. 
For a woman knows that wish in a man far sooner 
than he dreams he has the courage to attempt it. 
Had that wish been there in Anthony Sorel at that 
moment, she would have passed him by with a 
light in her eyes, a certain poise of the head, which 
would have given him his answer before he asked 
it. 

But there was none of this. She felt he almost 
resented her intrusion. And when he looked at her, 
it was as one who saw her in perspective with that 
vast outline of the hills when she would have had 
no other object for his eyes but her. 

So this it was that prompted her, urged her it 
would seem almost to attitude of defiance. Be- 
fore she knew the cunning of her tongue or had 
designed the gentle defenselessness of her pose, 
she had stopped and spoken as she passed. 

“I hope I don’t disturb you,” she said, “but can 
you tell me how I can get back to the road to Bally- 
saggartmore? I’ve been wandering about here for 
the last hour almost and I can’t find a path.” 

Not consciously did she strike the note of help- 
lessness in her voice, but there it was and, hearing 
the echoes of it in her ears, she knew that, had she 
been a man, she could not have resisted it. 

“The way you came,” said he, “will take you 
back.” He raised himself and pointed to the south. 
“Ballysaggartmore is over there.” 

125 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


Two things there were that fastened themselves 
upon her mind, the quality of his voice and, as he 
pointed the way across the moors, the wonderful 
refinement of his hands. Both were strange and 
unexpected in such a man in such a place. Curiosity 
became a conscious emotion in her then and, not- 
withstanding the finality of his information, she 
still lingered there, pursuing the swift impressions 
that sped across her mind. 

The first words then that came to her, she spoke, 
determining to force him into conversation that she 
might hear his voice again; resolving in herself to 
conquer his impenetrable reserve. 

“And which way is Foildarrig?” she asked. 

“Foildarrig is down there in the valley — the 
group of cottages close to that belt of trees.” 

Still he was looking at her when he spoke, as if 
she were no more than a part of the world his eyes 
were compassing. Where was her beauty then? 
she asked herself. 

When the issue between human beings is in the 
balance, no one knows swifter than a woman when 
her looks are put upon the scales. He had not so 
much as taken them to account; yet there she stood 
below him, with the wind blowing through the loose 
tresses of her hair, tinting her cheeks with that 
glow no art can imitate, knowing that if ever she 
had beauty it was with her then. This was driving 
her and almost in self-defense, as though each un- 
comprehending glance of his was an attack. 

“Do you know this part of the world well?” she 
126 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

asked, the very difficulty encouraging her to her 
purpose. 

“I live here,” said he. 

“Here?” She looked about her, across the long 
slopes of the hills, the wide stretches of the heather, 
the stray thorn trees bent and twisted by the pre- 
vailing winds. “Here?” she repeated. “Where?” 

By a motion of his hand, he lifted her eyes to 
the mountains above them. 

“On a sort of plateau up there,” said he, 
“there’s a small cottage. It’s mine.” 

“And you live there?” 

“I do.” 

“All the year round?” 

“All the year round.” 

“Not by yourself?” 

“Yes — by myself.” 

“Whatever for?” 

“One must live somewhere.” 

“Yes — but surely you choose company, don’t you?” 

“I have company.” 

“Whose?” 

There she stopped. An expression she could not 
read as yet had swept into the sensitive lines of his 
face. It might well have been displeasure at her 
questioning. She hastened to make amends. 

“Please forgive me,” she said quickly. “I’m very 
rude — aren’t I?” 

“Why should you say it’s rude to be curious?” 
he replied. “Everyone is curious. We cease to live 
when we cease to have curiosity.” 

127 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


She looked up to his table of rock and she smiled. 

“But you’re not curious.” 

“Oh — yes, I am,” said he — “thank God, full of 
curiosity.” 

“Not about me.” 

She remembered afterwards, indeed she was con- 
scious of it then, how he looked down at her as 
though aware of her personality for the first time. 

“No,” he replied slowly. “Isn’t it a waste of time 
to be curious about people?” 

This was a strange point of view. That none 
of them ever fulfilled her expectations had not de- 
terred her from being curious about people all 
her life. Yet strange as it was, it did not sound 
unexpected from him. Her mind did not even take 
offense at it, when from some other man she would 
intentionally have sought the personal implication. 

“I don’t find it a waste of time,” was all she said. 

There followed a silence and in that silence had 
his eyes been upon her, she would have let it con- 
tinue. But when she looked up again, he was gazing 
away to the high peak of Knockshunahallion where 
a white cloud, dropped down from the blue heav- 
ens, was brushing the crest with a fringe of mist. 

“Why do you think it is?” she continued. 

It was his reluctance that was stimulating to her 
and it was not the reluctance of one who will not be 
engaged, but of a mind engrossed with things beyond 
her comprehension. She felt she was against some 
barrier that human nature had never confronted her 
with before, which all the desire in her was leaping 
128 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


up to overcome. It was only by keeping her eyes 
fixed upon his face, she felt she could bring him to 
the consciousness of her question, and when at last 
he did answer, it was slowly made, as though he 
had left another world to speak to her. 

“Because people come and go,” he said. “That’s 
why it seems to me a waste of time to be curious 
about them. So much as they touch your own life 
and become for a time a part of it, they have all the 
meaning that people can have in the world and 
curiosity won’t help you to find out what that mean- 
ing is. You’ll discover it, a thing growing in and 
completing the growth of your own — soul.” He 
spoke that word with hesitation, as though she might 
misunderstand his use of it. “They set you back 
or help you onwards. The people you imagine and 
make in your own mind have more power of uplift- 
ing than any you meet in the flesh.” 

“Is that what you’re doing, up there on your 
perch of rock — dreaming about people you’ve never 
met?” 

For the first time he smiled and she saw the hidden 
charm in him. 

“I was not aware that I was doing anything,” said 
he. “I’ve been here for an hour before you came.” 

“Doing what?” 

“Nothing. Watching those lapwings down in the 
valley — listening to that lark. Every quarter of an 
hour, he makes a new flight up into the heavens. I 
don’t know what I’ve been doing. Look at those 
clouds gathering over the Galtee mountains. It’s 
129 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


something to watch them, isn’t it? In an hour’s time 
their shadows will be chasing across the moors.” 

She looked at him in growing interest, uncertain 
how to understand the things he said. For though in 
any other place, there might have seemed extrava- 
gance in the sound of his speech, yet there and in the 
simple manner in which he spoke, everything he said 
seemed to have a truer meaning. 

“You’re a queer person to meet — like this,” she 
said and candidly, for the first time unconsciously 
losing the woman in her and speaking just as one 
human being to another — as travelers speak, wend- 
ing their ways along the same road. Indeed, either 
because of him, or despite herself, she had taken 
off that garment of femininity in which she had been 
wrapped. The knowledge that he was a man and 
she was a woman and that there they were alone 
in the wild passes of those hills was swiftly dropping 
from her. It was the aloofness of his mind she 
knew had brought about the change. So she could 
come to candor and, undisguised, speak the passage 
of her thoughts. 

“You’d be the same as I am,” said he, “if you 
lived up here in the sounds and silences of the moun- 
tains. I’m not queer — only to you. I’m not queer 
to myself or to all those people who live in the farms 
and the cottages you see dotted about down there 
in the valley. At least — I don’t think I am. I know 
they believe that I talk with the faeries and do all 
sorts of strange things in my little cabin up there — 
but after all that’s not so queer a thing to them. 
130 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


They see faeries. There’s scarcely one of the old 
people about here who hasn’t seen some evidence of 
them one way or another. If you know the country 
hereabouts at all, you know that about them. Oh — 

I’m not queer ” He raised himself on the slab 

of rock and jumped down into the heather by her 
side. “You think about it — wherever you’re going 
to be to-night and if you’re going to be alone — you 
think about it. I’m not queer.” 

He had not hat to raise that he might bid her fare- 
well, but a faint smile came across his eyes as he 
turned away. So there she stood watching him 
as he climbed up the side of the mountain, then he 
turned upon the slope of the hill and was gone. 


CHAPTER III 


I T may not have entered Anthony Sorel’s mind 
when he bid Anna Quartermaine think about 
him that night, that she would so implicitly 
have obeyed. Despite herself, the thoughts were 
forced upon her and all the way back across the 
moors her mind ran upon little else. 

Who was he? Why did he live alone there in the 
stillness and in the wrath of those mountains? Was 
there madness in him — had he lost the gift of his 
wits? So common a thing is that solitary madness 
in Ireland — sane enough to evade the meaning of 
the Asylums Act — that it seemed a supposition rea- 
sonable enough when first her mind encountered it. 
Yet even that did not hold weight with her for long. 
He did not look as those witless creatures look. 
However distant it may have been, there was direc- 
tion in his eyes. The lapwings hovering in the valley 
far below, the clouds in their cumulus banks over 
the Galtee mountains, as he had said, it was doing 
something to watch them. Perhaps the thing she 
would have done herself, though with less meaning 
than he seemed to derive from so indefinite an 
occupation. 

No, that was not madness, she thought. Even 
when he spoke of the faeries, saying, as though it 
were the most ordinary fact in the world, that the 
132 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


old people had evidence of them, it was not as one 
who believes in the witlessness of his imagination. 
She could bring no conviction to her mind that his 
wits were gone. So far and no farther her thoughts 
had brought her when at evening she came back to 
the big house in Ballysaggartmore. 

Then, as her custom often was, when her mind 
was restless and she felt the solitude of the place 
about her, she sent for Father Nolan to take his 
evening meal with her. 

These invitations came always full of welcome to 
the parish priest. There were not many diversions 
in that neighborhood of Ballysaggartmore, and in 
no parish that he had ever known, he often said it, 
was there a woman of such attraction and intelli- 
gence as Anna Quartermaine. 

Though every week she made her confession to 
him in the cramped confessional of their little chapel, 
it was never, he felt, the woman who came to him, 
only that ordered creature with the human sins of 
omission and commission, obedient in mind to the 
regulations of her church, but ever with the spirit 
of insurrection holding about her the garb of mys- 
tery that she wore. 

The more she told him in confession, the less he 
knew of her when he met her in the world, where- 
fore, having no shame of his manhood as a priest, 
these little invitations to the big house — always sud- 
den and unexpected — were never refused by him. 
She gave him good wine. She could talk and with 
such experience of the world as in no woman he had 
133 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


ever met. Whenever she returned from her travels 
abroad, she entertained him with stories from every 
country she had visited. Full of that quaint ob- 
servation, intelligent women have, of the unexpected 
details of life, she could be witty, instructive, and of 
absorbing interest. 

Those little things which by right she should have 
told him in the confessional, she let fall in the casual 
course of their conversation. His eyes were keen 
enough to see through that. In the confessional 
there might have been forced upon her the little 
necessities of explanation; but at the dinner table, 
good manners forbade his questioning whereby the 
woman in her escaped detection. With all the wit 
of a clever tongue, with expressions too that swiftly 
came, inviting confidence, and as swiftly went when 
she deemed she had said enough, she made her ad- 
vance, she effected her retreat. The next instant 
the woman of whom she had accorded him that 
transitory glimpse, was gone. 

So it was when Father Nolan received her invita- 
tion on that still Spring evening, he went to the door 
of his room and called at once to his housekeeper. 
“Let ye eat the chop,” said he, “and don’t be cook- 
in’ but half the potatoes, I’m goin’ to have me dinner 
at the big house.” 

There was always a warm sense of satisfaction 
within him when he made that announcement. He 
knew with what respect it was received in the 
kitchen; how it would be well across the village 
before the night had fallen. To add to the warmth 
134 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


of it, he took her note from its envelope and read 
it through once again. 

There is a place laid for you this evening and an empty 
chair for you to fill. 

That was all. This second time as he read it, he 
smiled. The brevity, the precision, the confident 
expectation, they were all so characteristic of her. 
He knew so well what she would say were he to 
refuse, the look of astonishment that would come 
into her face, the countless ways she would punish 
him for that declining, with the ready assumption to 
her mind that he had something better to do. But 
he never refused and short of the extreme exigencies 
of his calling, she never expected that he would. 

Having thrust the letter back again into his pocket, 
therefore, he reached down his old silk hat from its 
peg in the hall, looked at his hands and shook his 
head when on any other occasion he would have 
pronounced them “clean enough,” and, opening 
the door, he set out down the street to the big house, 
hiding in its belt of trees on the outskirts of the 
village. 

“I’ll wash me hands and I gettin’ there,” said he. 

On those occasions, when there was no other com- 
pany, he was shown into a little boudoir next to the 
dining-room and, much as he liked company, being 
a native of his land, he preferred these quiet even- 
ings alone with her who was company enough for 
any man. 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


The servant closed the door quietly behind him 
as he crossed to the fireplace and sat down, pre- 
paring for those long moments of anticipation which 
he knew her unvaried habit it was to keep him 
waiting. 

Seven-thirty were the figures she had written at 
the foot of her sheet of notepaper. According to a 
little enameled clock on the mantelpiece, it was 
five-and-twenty to eight. He folded his hands on 
his lap and stared into the fire. 

He was not a young man; he was not an old. 
That age he was, so she often told him, when a man 
can keep his illusions about Romance and yet be 
sensible with women. That was her way of putting 
it and invariably she would make it the more per- 
sonal by assuring him how impersonal it was. In- 
deed she was the only woman he knew, who con- 
stantly reminded him that he was vowed to Holy 
Orders and that by ostensibly helping him to for- 
get it. 

He had never told her his age. He had never 
told it to anyone. He was fifty-three; indeed just 
that age when a man volunteers no unnecessary in- 
formation about it. He was handsome to look at; 
handsome in that ascetic way which is one of the 
two types you find amongst the priests of Ireland. 
There are no intermediary types. The Church 
breeds but two classes of men only. He was of the 
class that finds promotion and, had he been on good 
terms with his bishop, would never have remained 
in Ballysaggartmore. 


136 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


There was a kindly humor in his eyes when his 
mind was engaged in conversation. In repose they 
had that far inward look which belongs to the 
visionary when it does not belong to the Church. 
His cheek bones were high, his thin lips sometimes 
twisting humorously, sometimes drooping to that 
sudden sadness which is so innate in the race. He 
was tall and slight, a slimness of figure that went 
far to conceal his age. Indeed he was a man of 
pleasing appearance. It is doubtful if Anna Quar- 
termaine would have had him so often to her table 
unless. For this certainly was characteristic of 
her. She was a beautiful woman who neither 
needed, nor could endure the contrast of ugliness 
about her. All the servants at the big house were 
chosen as much for their looks as their ability. 

“There’s no need for people to be ugly,” she 
said, “and when they are, there’s still less need to 
look at them. That’s why you come here to dine 
with me so often,” she said to Father Nolan. “I 
couldn’t bear it if you were ugly. But you’ve got 
such a nice ascetic old face that I like looking at it.” 

So she reminded him of his Holy Orders in the 
same breath that she persuaded him to forget them. 
No man objects to that. 

The enameled clock on the mantelpiece was just 
drawing its breath to strike the hour of eight when 
the door opened, wakening him from the reverie into 
which he had fallen. 

He rose to his feet and turned round. She stood 
in the doorway in a light dinner gown, perfectly 
137 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


draped about her. First she smiled. This was her 
apology. Then she said, 

“I’m not late — am I? Say I’m not late.” 

He said she was not, knowing that this was the 
form of apology expected from him to set her mind 
at rest. 


CHAPTER IV 


T HEY sat down for dinner to the table where 
four shaded candles were burning in tall 
Queen Anne silver candlesticks. This was 
the only light in the room; strange illumination in 
those days when a brilliantly lighted table was con- 
sidered beautiful. 

They had it in Ballysaggartmore that Anna Quar- 
termaine took all her meals in the dark and sat in 
the dark too by herself at nights in the big room 
that looked over the mountains. 

“An’ wouldn’t that be queer,” they said, “for 
one as handsome as herself?” By which it must 
be supposed they meant she was hiding her beauty. 

But Anna Quartermaine knew better than to hide 
her beauty; she knew better than to be too generous 
with it. Whatever he may have thought of those 
shaded lights as means of illumination, Father No- 
lan always came away from the big house with the 
impression of a man who has been in the presence 
of beauty rather than of one who has had it thrust 
upon his sight. 

On that Spring evening, he sat down to table, 
conscious that there was some purpose in his being 
asked there and equally content to wait until she 
saw fit to tell him what it was. Quite possibly he 
may have imagined its substance ; some little thing, 
10 139 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


as so frequently happened, of which she had no 
desire to unburden herself in the confessional, some 
twinge of the conscience which could not be con- 
strued into a measure requiring absolution; some in- 
tention upon which her mind was already set, yet for 
which she needed the warrant of his approval. 

These were the subtle and feminine motions of 
her mind which required far more delicate treat- 
ment than the open admission of venial sins in the 
confessional. He was used to such dealings with 
her. So far as it is possible for a man to under- 
stand, he knew the directions of her mind. 

“My spiritual adviser — ” so she sometimes ad- 
dressed him, half in jest, half in earnest; and in 
such capacity it was often when her determination 
was set upon a certain course that she called him to 
her, conjuring cunningly from his lips his approval 
of the thing she meant to do. So many times had 
her tricks deceived him, that he had become wary 
of the fascination of her craft. This evening he set 
to his meal in silence, as though to share her food 
was the only purpose of her invitation. 

“Have you got nothing to say?” she said at last. 

He looked up humorously from his plate. 

“Plenty,” said he — “but ’tis nothin’ so good as ye 
might be saying yeerself.” 

“How do you know I’ve got anything to say?” 

“Didn’t ye ask me here to take the dinner with 
ye?” 

She laughed and the shaded light of those four 
candles all added to the mystery of her laughter. 
140 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“You’re a dear thing,” said she. “You know me 
very well — don’t you?” 

This was one of her guiles, a cloak thrown across 
his eyes, all embroidered with the charm of that 
term of endearment. He knew what it meant. It 
meant that he knew her so well that his eyes were 
blinded to what she really was, to what she had fully 
made up her mind to be. 

“Go on,” he said smiling. “What is it ye’ve got 
to say?” 

And when, in the simplest voice in the world y 
she assured him that quite honestly there was noth- 
ing, what else was there to do but for him to believe 
her? It was then, but not till then that she pro- 
ceeded with all her subtleties to tell him what it was; 
not that he might know, when all the telling had 
been made, but that she could obtain from him 
whatever expression of opinion she might need. 
This much, however, must be said for him; he had 
his shrewd suspicion he was being so dealt with — 
the vague impression, but no more. 

Yet notwithstanding that shrewd suspicion, her 
first question came upon him utterly unawares. Rest- 
ing her cheek in her hand and, beneath the glow of 
those shaded candles, setting her eyes to his, she 
said, 

“Do you believe in the faeries?” 

He laid down his knife and fork and met her eyes 
with his astonishment. 

“Now, in the name of the Almighty God,” said 
he, “why are ye asking me a thing like that?” 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“The people about here believe in them,” said 
she — “the old people do.” 

“They do indeed.” 

“Well — don’t you tell them how foolish it is?” 

“Shure, why would I?” 

He was beginning to lose all consciousness of that 
shrewd suspicion. She had this quality. She could 
always distract his mind with the interest of what 
she said. 

“Why would I?” he repeated. “Shure, what 
harm are they doing believing in the faeries? Didn’t 
old Mary Quinn the other day go down on her two 
knees bended and implore me the way I’d sprinkle 
the room of her cottage with Holy Water an’ she 
kept wakin’ at nights by the noises they made, sing- 
ing and dancing till her ears were deafened with it?” 

“What were the noises? Did you find out?” 

“I did not. ’Twas in her ears she heard them, 
not in mine.” 

“Well — did you sprinkle the Holy Water?” 

“I did not, of course.” 

“Why not?” 

“Shure what would herself be saying about us if 
I brought her the Holy Water and never a sound of 
their dancing went out of her head from that day 
to this?” 

“You don’t believe there was anything in it then?” 

“Shure, I wouldn’t say that. I’ve no doubt there 
was something the pore woman heard in her ears. 
Didn’t I send the doctor to have a look at her?” 

“What did he say?” 


142 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“He said ’twas not in her ears at all — but her 
mind had it, the way she could describe the patter- 
ing of their feet and even repeat some of the songs 
they sang — and she no poet, mind ye, to be invent- 
ing the things she said. ‘ ’Tis no matter for the 
priest,’ said I — ‘an’ ’tis no matter for the doctor,’ 
says he, for ye couldn’t put a woman like that into 
an asylum an’ she just hearing the noise of music ye 
couldn’t hear yeerself.” 

Something in the reserve of his speech committed 
him to a belief he would not openly subscribe to. 
She sat there at the end of the table, watching him 
as he continued with his meal, all the lighter spirit 
of her manner gone, and in its place a gentle serious- 
ness that softened to a shadow in her eyes. 

“You don’t think she was mad?” she asked pres- 
ently. 

He looked up at her, knowing in the cadence of 
her voice, in the gentled expression of her face, that 
all subtlety had gone from her; that now she was 
truly herself, disrobed of all the secreting garments 
of her sex. Why this subject had brought her such 
a mood was beyond his understanding. He had seen 
it in her before. Once, when she had believed she 
was in love, she had given him this glimpse of her 
real self, a prey to emotion, her spirit striving for 
those upward and exalted flights of the mind where 
no reason or quality of the intelligence could fol- 
low. 

But in all the course of his knowledge of her, she 
had never spoken of the faeries before. When he 
143 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


brought his eyes back to the plate before him, he 
still was at a loss to understand this sudden inclina- 
tion of her thoughts. 

“Do you think she was mad?” she repeated, when 
her question remained still unanswered. 

“I do not,” said he — “no more than there are 
times when I’m mad and ye’re mad. Shure, don’t 
they say about here that ’tis queer ye are yeerself 
an’ ye never marrying any man at all.” 

“Do they say that?” 

She smiled, but with an odd humor, not of laugh- 
ter, in her face. 

“They do indeed,” said he. 

“Do you think I’m queer?” 

He looked up with a laugh in his eyes. 

“Well now — what do ye want me to say to that?” 
he asked. 

“Just what you think.” 

“Well — then, I suppose I do.” 

“Why?” 

He knew just how carefully this question must be 
answered and debated some moments before he 
spoke. But she was eager to know. She could not 
wait long to be told. 

“Why?” she said again — and again, “Why?” 

“Well — aren’t there many men have asked ye?” 
said he. 

“Yes— many.” 

Indeed there were many in his knowledge alone. 
She never had any wish to hide them from him. 
“There was a man — he was in love with me by the 
144 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


way — ” so she ushered in many a story for his 
hearing. Knowing her friendship for him there 
were not a few who had admitted as much to him 
themselves, begging for his intercession, seeking his 
counsel. To one and all of them, he had said the 
same thing. 

“Anna Quartermaine,” said he, “will do what 
she wants to, when she knows what it is.” 

“Don’t ye think, then, that ye’re queer yeerself,’* 
said he, “an’ ye refusing them all?” 

She leant back in her chair, all interest of the 
meal lost in this of more absorbing moment. It was 
a charming egotism. There was no discussion she 
liked so well as an argument about herself, setting 
forth her virtues as best became them, admitting her 
faults with a fascinating reluctance; making volun- 
tary confessions of the creature she was, and always 
with the same naive conclusion, “Don’t you know 
that about me?” 

The parish priest knew this mood in her well and 
never made endeavor to discourage it. Some new 
feature of herself he learnt on every occasion when 
it was displayed; yet never did she admit so much 
as gave him power to penetrate the mystery of her 
sex. With it all, she still remained the woman no 
man can see or understand. 

Such a mood she was entering upon now. With 
every interest awake in him, he anticipated it. There 
were ways of encouraging her, and he knew them 
well. Finding her eyes lost in that contemplation 
which sees no barrier to the limitations of one’s sur- 
145 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


roundings, he urged her with yet another question. 
But there was no emphasis in his voice. He spoke 
quite gently as one who wakes a sleeper from his 
dreams. 

“I suppose ’tis the way ye’ve never found a man 
to yeer liking?” 

She glanced up at that, when he could see how he 
had struck a note which vibrated. 

“There are so many men,” she said — “and so 
many me’s. That’s what’s the matter. The tinker, 
the tailor, the soldier, the sailor and so on and so 
on — the beggarman and thief — do you understand?” 

He nodded his head. 

“There’s never been a chemist in love with me 
though.” 

“Why a chemist?” 

“Well — ” she was half teasing, but half she meant 
the spirit of what she said — “You never know. 
Think if the whole world became too difficult, what 
a wonderful potion a chemist could give you — if he 
were in love.” 

Father Nolan smiled at her, not altogether in 
laughter. Despite himself he had caught the note 
of meaning in her voice. 

“Do ye think he would give it ye,” said he, “if 
the young man were in love?” 

“But of course,” she said, “that ’ud be the only 
way he could prove it. What would be the good of 
his being a chemist, if he wouldn’t do that?” 

“Rather a penalty for the pore man,” said he. 

“But isn’t there always a penalty?” she replied 
146 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


and little knew the truth she said. “If I love a sol- 
dier, he must be a soldier and the greatest glory a 
soldier can have is to die fighting. That’s why I 
don’t want to marry a soldier. It’s no good marry- 
ing a man if you’re going to lose him. I want to keep 
the thing I love — don’t you know that about me?” 

He laid down his knife and fork and broke into 
laughter. There was the charm of something irre- 
sistible in her folly, perhaps because there was more 
than mere folly to it all. She was not only talking 
of herself now. She was voicing one of the hidden 
secrets of her sex. 

“Supposing ye didn’t lose him?” said he. “It isn’t 
all soldiers die that way. Indeed ’tis a good many 
would be surprised to hear they had a chance of 
it. Wasn’t there an officer I knew in the North 
Cork Militia and didn’t he get his death with a cold, 
waiting for a lady at the corner of Patrick’s Bridge 
and she never turning up for him till the rain had 
drenched the coat on him and Mangan’s clock 
pointed to an hour after the time she said she’d be 
there? Shure, what’s wrong with a soldier beyond 
the chances of his getting shot, if he’ll come by his 
death like that for a woman? What was the matter 
with Major Allen, except that he was an English- 
man, mind ye? Was there e’er a man ye’d have 
more right to call a man, than that fella? Didn’t 
he stand six foot two in his stocking vamps and 
wasn’t he as handsome as an Apollo in a hateful red 
tunic? Didn’t he almost lose his wits about ye and 
shure what was the matter with him?” 

147 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


He had dropped his voice to a gentler note, know- 
ing that he spoke of one of those tender incidents 
in her life for which memory still chastised her with 
sudden lashes of regret. 

“What was the matter with him?” she repeated — 
“just that he wasn’t a tinker or a tailor or a beggar- 
man or a thief — that’s all. He was a soldier — just 
a soldier. And he was fond of me — wasn’t he? 
You know that. But when I first met him, I thought 
I loved soldiers — then after a time I got so tired 
of them. Life would have become a regiment of 
days if I’d married him. We should have trooped 
our colors till they were in rags. Why must a man 
be anything? Why can’t he be everything? Spiritual 
adviser — I shall never marry. There are too many 
men in the world and they’re all something different. 
And if I married one, I should be bound to see 
something in the other that I wanted. Come along 
— let’s go into the other room. That’s why I’m 
queer. Tell them that if they ever ask you. I won- 
der would they ever understand it.” 

She rose from her chair and led the way into the 
little room beyond. There, she crossed to the win- 
dow and stood looking out through the darkness to 
where the mountains rose like purple rainclouds 
against the evening pallor of the sky. 

“I wonder what it’s like,” she said. “I wonder 
what it’s like at night to be up there alone in the 
mountains.” 


CHAPTER V 


T HERE she stood for some minutes, holding 
the curtain back against the white line of her 
bare arm, not an outline of her face visible 
to him as she gazed out to that land of the moun- 
tains over which hung the silver sickle of an early 
moon. 

“Would you call a man queer,” she asked sud- 
denly and turned round into the room, letting the 
curtains fall together behind her — “would you call 
a man queer who preferred the singing of birds to 
the voices of the greatest singers, who would sooner 
watch clouds gathering over the hills, and lapwings 
hovering over the fields, than the motions of people 
going about the world, who would sooner listen to 
the babbling of a stream than the talk of human 
beings — would you call him queer?” 

She was so full of unexpected moods for Father 
Nolan that night that he relinquished all hope of 
understanding her. 

“Is there such a man?” said he, at haphazard in 
order to gain time. 

“I’ve known a man like that,” she replied. 
“Would you say he was queer?” 

“Well — I’d sooner hear frogs croaking than I’d 
listen to a fella with a voice like Jamesy Power; and 
I’d sooner see an old cow going home to be milked 
149 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


than I’d watch Molly Heggarty walking the road to 
Mass of a Sunday. I don’t know would I say he 
was queer, if he’d as good a reason for doing it as 
that.” 

“I don’t know what his reason was,” said she. 
“He just cut himself off from the world and there 
was something in his eyes that defied you — a sort of 
mental advantage, a kind of spiritual supremacy, that 
dared you to assail it.” 

She had come back into the room, back to the 
extravagance of a fire lit in Spring. And there she 
sat, staring into the glowing embers of it, with that 
look in her eyes women so often indulge in — a look 
when they fondle a memory with little contemplative 
smiles to make you jealous of it. It was inevitable 
that question of his which followed. She prompted 
— indeed she asked for it. 

“I suppose that was why ye did assail it?” said 
he. 

She could not quite trust her eyes to meet the 
glance of his, for in that moment he had revealed 
her to herself. She was smiling and hiding her 
smile. He imagined it to be of the past, but what he 
had said was true of her in the days that lay before 
her. Until that instant she had not fully realized 
how surely the eyes of Anthony Sorel had defied her; 
had not realized how surely, too, the spirit of Ro- 
mance had stirred in her to answer that defiance. 

“Am I right?” he asked presently, when her head 
was still turned away from him and she had given 
no answer to his question. 

150 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


Then, with an effort, she could look at him, forc- 
ing that expression of far memory into her eyes, 
simulating that note in the voice which speaks of 
what is long distant — a faintly refreshed memory. 

“I must be loved,” she answered. “Don’t you 
know that? You don’t blame me — do you?” 

Here, if he but knew it, she was seeking his ap- 
proval, winning his consent for the thing her myid 
already was deliberating upon. With that subtle 
logic of women, she could deceive herself that the 
issue was the same whether it were of a matter that 
was past or of an intention yet to come. Forgive- 
ness for the thing done, she argued, was approval 
of the thing in contemplation; yet she knew well 
enough that the first was much easier to obtain. 

Deceived by now by the intricacies of her mood, 
the parish priest little knew how he was contributing 
to the decision her mind had set itself upon. 
Shrewdly suspicious though he was, he was no match 
for her cunning here. He did not blame her, he 
said, but remembering the hopeless passion of the 
man whose name he had just mentioned, all his 
sympathies went out to this other victim of her 
fascination. 

“An’ I suppose ye robbed the pore fella of his 
mental advantage,” said he. “Ye didn’t leave a rag 
of that spiritual supremacy to his back?” 

He thought of his own ideals, the illusions he 
cherished, the vows he had taken, and a bitter regret 
for the remorse that man must have suffered, swept 
like a hot wind across his mind. Almost he felt his 
151 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


anger rise against her, and swiftly enough she saw 
that in his eyes. 

“You don’t like me,” she said at once and felt a 
martyr to his anger because, she told herself, the 
thing had never been. 

“I’m not saying that,” said he. 

“No — but I know that’s what you think. Yet 
after all why should a man be like that? It’s not 
natural, is it? He wasn’t meant for it. It’s all 
right for a priest.” 

He looked at her seriously, knowing that here she 
was saying things which should be spoken of in 
the confessional, yet finding himself, as often he had 
done before, giving her the absolution of his sym- 
pathy for sins she had never committed. 

“Ye make the great mistake,” he said at last, 
“the way ye think that celibacy is a matter of the 
body and not of the mind at all. Is it impossible 
for ye to conceive of a man, without his vows to the 
church being taken, who needs to lift his mind above 
the things ye set such a pass on? Love’s a great 
thing, I’m not saying it’s not, mind ye; and a good 
many people would be the better for knowing what 
it was. But can’t ye imagine a man making that 
ideal of it, the way he’d sooner see the end of him- 
self than bring it down to earth?” 

“Well?” said she and in that one word conveyed 
a thousand things. For suddenly her mind had 
leaped to the wonder and beauty of such a love as 
that; suddenly she had caught sight of the possibility 
of such a love for her in that young man she had 
152 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


met in the mountains; suddenly she had realized 
that to such a love, she could find the answer to all 
her needs of life. And realizing it, in that one word, 
she had swiftly conveyed to him that this was what 
had happened in the past, because of her sure an- 
ticipation of it in the days to come. 

As readily he was caught by the suggestion of 
that delicate inflexion in her voice. 

“Is that what happened?” said he. 

She nodded her head. 

“Well, then,” he continued, “ye know what the 
best of love can be like in a man and ye may go the 
whole length of yeer life and ye’ll never find it 
again. Did he never say a word of it to ye?” 

“No — not a word.” 

And now to his questioning, with all the eager 
fancy of her imagination, she was presaging her own 
Romance with Anthony Sorel as she conceived it 
well might be. 

“I don’t know then,” said Father Nolan presently, 
“that ye do yeerself justice when ye admit that 
ye robbed the man of his mental advantage. It 
seems to me that he must have got away with it safe 
and sound and every rag of spiritual supremacy 
whole on his back, though, mind ye, there’s one thing 
I can’t understand.” 

“What’s that?” 

He set his eyes with all their shrewdness straight 
to hers. 

“I can understand,” said he, “how ye knew he 
was in love with ye — shure a woman sees that with 
153 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


her two eyes shut — but will ye tell me how it was ye 
let the pore fella go an’ he not breathing a word 
of it to satisfy the mere human vanity of ye? Can 
ye tell me that?” 

She could meet his eyes. In the determination 
of what she meant her Romance with Anthony Sorel 
should be, she could resist the full scrutiny of his 
glance. Almost the swift flame of indignation was 
there in her face as the fine whip of his assumption 
fell across her conscience. 

“I shouldn’t rob a church,” said she and threw 
her head back to face his eyes. “Don’t you know 
that about me?” 

“I do indeed,” said he. “Ye’d never rob a church, 
I know that; but ye’d make love to the priest inside 
of it.” 

There was one instant when her anger might have 
overwhelmed him; when there might have been no 
more dinners at the big house for him for many a 
week to come. He knew that. His eyes twinkled 
with the danger of it, knowing, as he did, that you 
must not speak truth to a woman. But he had taken 
his chance, well aware of the woman he dealt with. 
That was only one instant, for the next her eyes 
were full of laughter. He was the only man who 
could have dared to give her truth like that. He 
was the only man who could have known it. 

The laughter in her eyes came tumbling to her 
lips. There were so many things he did not know, 
that in that moment she could decide how little it 
mattered that he knew so much. 

154 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“Oh — you’re a dear thing,” she said between her 
laughter. “I wouldn’t let another man in the world 
know so much about me.” And so persuaded him 
to the belief he had all there was to know. 

“Well — an’ all that,” said he, “doesn’t tell me 
why ye let the fella go.” 

“He hasn’t gone,” said she. 

“Not gone?” 

“No — he’s in love with me still — he’ll always be 
in love with me.” 

For this was how she saw the devotion of An- 
thony Sorel, lasting her life through; a great and 
imperishable passion she could feed her soul upon 
when the years had long taken the beauty from her 
eyes. 

“An’ don’t ye want him ever to speak of it?” he 
asked. 

Her eyes looked wistful. It was all so new to 
her, this sudden fancy of Romance. 

“I don’t know,” she said speculatively — “I don’t 
know. Sometimes I believe I don’t — sometimes I 
believe I do.” 

“Are ye going to marry him?” he whispered. 

She took alarm at that. 

“Oh — I don’t believe I shall ever marry!” she 
exclaimed. “That ’ud spoil it all.” 

“Well, then, don’t let him speak,” said he, “an’ 
he’ll probably fall humanly in love with some good- 
natured creature, the way he’ll cherish an ideal for 
the rest of his days.” 

“But I don’t want him to fall in love with any- 
11 155 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


body else,” she retorted quickly. “I suppose that’s 
wrong of me — is it? Say it isn’t wrong.” 

For a long moment he looked at her. 

“Ye can’t hold the world in yeer hand and have 
it at yeer feet,” said he, and then he went into the 
hall for his old silk hat. She followed, watching 
him as he thrust it on his head. 

“You haven’t said it wasn’t wrong,” she said as 
he moved to the door. 

“D’ye want me to?” 

“Yes.” 

“Well — I suppose if I said it was wrong, I should 
be finding fault with one of the laws of Nature.” 

“And you don’t do that — do you?” 

“I do not.” 

“Oh— I’m so glad.” 

She said it again, as she closed the door behind 
him. For this was her confession and here was his 
approval. It is true he knew nothing of that office 
of confessor which had been forced upon him. But 
then so she had determined it and, that night, lay 
her head down on her pillow with a conscience warm 
in the thought that she had told him everything there 
was as yet to tell. Her eyes closed quite peacefully 
as she went to sleep. Romance was before her. 
There is not much more a woman asks for amongst 
the glittering prospects of life. 


CHAPTER VI 


I T wa« the morning of May Eve when next Anna 
Quartermaine passed by Feagarrid on her way 
up into the mountains. The sun was a burning 
light through the mist as she rose above the valley, 
following the rough cart-wheel tracks across the 
moors. Now again, as always when she walked 
the countryside alone, she unpinned the hat from her 
head and shook the hair loose upon her forehead. 
This was freedom and the sense of it through every 
pulse. In moments the humming below her breath 
became the uttered song in her voice, then fell to the 
muted note once more. 

There is fearlessness and there is joy in the heart 
of a woman when she sets out in pursuit of Ro- 
mance. Everything is to be gained and not a little 
to lose, wherefore her heart beats high as in one 
who comes upon the hour of his fateful venture. 

From that evening of her confession to Father 
Nolan, her mind was set upon meeting the young 
man again in the mountains. Another month of the 
Spring there was and a whole Summer yet before 
her when, in the uneventful course of life, she would 
have spent her days in her garden or walking the 
moors in a happy freedom, demanding the joy of 
it in all she did. 

This indeed in her earlier youth had been all that 
157 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


she had asked of life. Abroad, where others were 
content with the exotic pleasures of continental exist- 
ence, she had found no joy but in the wild silences 
of untrodden ways, wandering alone by herself every 
day, returning tired at evening with ten and twenty 
miles on foot to the credit of her strength and endur- 
ance. In Monte Carlo where she often went, in 
Biarritz too, it was never for the so-called holiday 
spent at the Casino, or on the Plage, wearing frocks 
to bestir the envy in others. So she might have 
occupied herself had she chosen; but it was the passes 
in the mountains behind Monte Carlo to Eze and 
La Turbie and in Biarritz into the heart of the 
Pyrenees where she walked and walked alone. 

They had their gossip and their stories about this 
beautiful Englishwoman who at evening would be 
seen returning across the Plage in a short tweed 
skirt and heavy boots all whitened with the dust of 
her travels. She had her lover, they said, and hid 
him in the mountains. They never would have be- 
lieved she only found the joy of life in the mountain 
wind-flowers, the warm valleys and the sloping for- 
ests of the olive trees. 

Men had loved her. That she admitted and never 
forgot to remind Father Nolan of it. But it had 
been in her solitude with Nature, she alone had 
found the deepest meanings in life. Many were the 
times she had seated herself on some lofty ledge of 
the hills, beside some purring stream, in the heart of 
some sunlit valley and, burying her face in her hands, 
had let the tears gather slowly in her eyes because 
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THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


she had never found such understanding in human 
beings as offered itself there on every side of her. 

But now, latterly, as if with the growth of her 
character, had come the need of and the belief in 
human understanding. The utmost of it, certainly, 
she had found in Father Nolan. He, greatly indeed, 
yet unconsciously to both of them, had been the 
cause of the change in her. However, as yet, she 
had sought for it in others and in vain. Many men 
truly there were, giving her devotion, whole-heart- 
edly, faithfully and with all the full ardor of the 
love she stirred in them. Nevertheless and always 
willingly receiving it, it still seemed to her it was 
not the thing she asked. For however it might be 
that these relationships began, they always culmi- 
nated in one inevitable expression. So well did she 
know the inception of that passion ultimate in their 
minds, and so surely did it terminate the higher 
hopes that had been raised in hers. 

Sometimes there were men in whom the devotion 
that she sought was not thus expressed in the terms 
she feared. These clung in her memory, cherished 
recollections she would not part with, as when a 
man in the sentimentality of his nature keeps under 
lock and key a crumpled rose, a piece of faded 
ribbon. 

Had she stopped to analyze them, she might have 
realized how the want of opportunity had made 
them what they were. But quite unconscious of that, 
they remained memories of those possibilities of 
Romance which a woman takes into the imagination 
159 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


of her heart — a man too for that matter — because 
they had never attained the full course of their ex- 
pression. 

These indeed are the strange encounters in life 
that linger while others, even more definite, are lost 
in the bewildering flux of time. Such an adventure 
was one, constant in its recurrence to her mind. She 
was traveling to the South on the Cote d’Azur Ex- 
press. In her carriage were three women whose 
conversation was not slow to find its way to the 
edges of her nerves. Annoyed at last beyond en- 
durance by their empty chatter, she had left the com- 
partment and wandered down the corridor. None 
of the carriages were empty. Her own sex was 
everywhere in occupation of some corner and women 
were not wildly to her liking at any time. 

There was a smoking compartment, however, hav- 
ing but one occupant — a man buried in his paper, 
chewing the cud of contentment in a well-worn pipe. 
Here were all the signs of peace. She had pulled 
aside the door and, as was customary in her with 
men, had had no hesitation in making an immediate 
acquaintance. 

“Shall I be disturbing you if I come in here?” she 
had asked, at which the pipe had been taken out of 
his mouth, the paper flattened upon his knee, all 
with an alacrity she expected of men, which more- 
over she was always ready to repay. 

They had talked of a thousand things, all strange 
and interesting to her because revealing a new 
nature. And what was more, there was admiration 
160 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


adding fresh light in his eyes each moment as they 
sped onwards to the South. This was the sun to her. 
She breathed the joy of life in the warmth of it. 
There was so much he could have spoken had he 
dared; so much that circumstance demanded he 
should leave unsaid. By the time they reached 
Lyons, he was saying them all with his eyes. 

And here it was, he had told her, that their jour- 
neys parted. Even she had not hid her regret at 
that. 

“Think of the blaze of sun there will be in the 
South,” she said when he helped her out on to the 
windy platform as they went for cups of hot coffee. 

That was her way of showing her regret, by mak- 
ing him regret their parting all the more. 

For a moment as she sipped her hot coffee in the 
drafty restaurant — a moment of her sudden impulse 
— he left her. Five minutes he might have been 
gone — no more — but a long time, she thought, for 
one who wished to convey he was sorry to see the 
last of her. She was laying her cup down when he 
returned and on the platform the guards were crying, 
“En voiture! En voiture ! ,f 

She had hurried back to her compartment, but 
before she reached the carriage, he stopped and held 
out his hand. 

“Bon voyage ” he said, “et tout le soleil que vous 
merit ez.” 

“Not even seeing me into my carriage?” she asked 
— frankly disappointed now. 

He took her to the steps of the corridor, then, 
161 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


lifting his hat, he turned and hurried away, never 
looking round, though she stood there upon the steps 
to give him every opportunity. 

When she reached the empty smoking compart- 
ment there was the seat she had occupied heaped 
with a pyramid of red roses and on the top of it a 
scrap of paper. Something was written upon it. 
She had picked it up and read the words : 

Thank God I am not coming to the South. 

There was a proof of the impulse it had been. 
He had not even stopped to consider the wrong con- 
struction being put upon what he wrote. There had 
been but one meaning in his mind. She knew what 
it was. While the train was speeding through the 
little station of Tarascon, she was still sorting out 
the roses from the forest upon the seat. 

This was a memory she cherished. Had he ever 
said more than those clumsy words, hastily written 
on that slip of paper, it had been a thing she might 
so easily have forgotten. 

Father Nolan had been the parish priest in Bally- 
saggartmore some two or three years before that had 
happened. She had told him all about it, half lightly, 
half with those tender little tricks of recollection as 
when she spoke of all the men who had loved her. 
And this incident had been but one, marking the 
inception of that change in her nature. 

Now, loving the untrodden ways of the world just 
as well as ever, she had come to find understanding 
162 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


also in human creatures that beat a heart with hers. 
And so it was there had risen in her mind this wel- 
come expectancy of Romance, changing the whole 
prospect of the idle months that lay before her. 

For the first hour, in the sheer joy of that Spring- 
time of the year, she almost forgot the mission upon 
which she was bent. But as the still slopes of the 
mountains rose above her and the green emerald of 
that valley of the Araglin lay below, her heart began 
a livelier pulse. The blood came quickly and as 
quickly went in sudden flushes upon her cheeks. 

Supposing he were not to be found? Was she to 
count the day and all those miles that lay behind 
her as wasted — just thrown away, dead empty things, 
from the lap of time? A few years before that 
would never have been; but now, as the thought 
reached her, she was conscious of apprehension and 
the prospect of her chagrin if it should be so. 

The table rock as she came upon the sight of it 
was no longer occupied. No one was to be seen. 
Here and there a stray sheep grazed on the falling 
slopes. The clouds over the Galtee mountains were 
the only moving things that met her eyes. In count- 
less broken shapes, like the sails of a fishing fleet, 
they rode out into the immeasurable blue from their 
hidden harbor of the hills. 

A wide world she found it was in which to search 
for one human being. Great though the distances 
of vision might be, there was many a hidden pass, 
many a rent and turn in the rolling sweep of the hills 
where the eye could be cheated in its pursuit. She 
163 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


sat down on a bowlder that had come to rest, half 
embedded in a mound of earth. Now she realized 
how, without the generosity of chance, it were almost 
a futile hope to think of meeting him. 

Yet there she remained for an hour and more, 
taking in with her eyes that broad prospect of the 
hills she supposed he fed his mind upon. There 
were the lapwings, tumbling and turning in their 
seemingly senseless flight above the green fields of 
the valley. Not more than a few yards from her a 
lark rose up, scattering the notes of its song as it 
lifted into the air. Stone-chats were chirping in their 
sudden invisible flights from one rock to another. 
Now and again a bee with muted thunder would rush 
by her ears. A stoat crept out of the brush of the 
heather on to the little beaten path. He lifted his 
sharp nose suspiciously and sniffed the air. Though 
she never stirred, she could see how well aware of 
her he was. Every movement of his sinuous body 
as he crept away was apprehensive and alert. 

That short hour brought to her mind the knowl- 
edge that there is no real solitude in the world; it 
showed her too the utter peacefulness with which his 
mind must live. And then, while she was still sit- 
ting there, her eyes picked out the figure of a man 
climbing slowly up the path from the valley by which 
she had come. 

Whatever the first impression may have been, 
stirring her blood to a sudden motion, she soon real- 
ized that it was not the figure of him for whom 
she had been seeking. It was an elderly 
164 


man — 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


one, living in a cottage, no doubt, in the neighbor- 
hood of those hills. As soon as she realized by his 
apparent direction, he must pass her way, she sat 
there waiting, her mind already determined upon 
what she would do. 

In time he turned a corner of the path, when at 
once his little wrinkled eyes took sight of her. She 
thought again of the stoat she had seen as she 
watched him approaching. There was the same 
sharp suspicious air about him as he came slowly 
to where she sat. When he was but a few paces 
off, she spoke. 

“There’s a man living up here alone in the moun- 
tains,” she said. “Could you tell me where his cot- 
tage is?” 

“There’s more than one man livin’ alone in the 
windy corners of these hills,” said he, stopping and 
resting on his stick as he peered at her. “Shure 
don’t I live meself over there in that little cabin 
below Crow Hill where ye can see the shmoke twist- 
in’ up out of it now?” 

She smiled, telling him he was not the man she 
meant. “He’s younger than you,” she added. 

She felt he knew well enough of whom she was 
speaking and only with the cunning of a child was 
assuming ignorance in order to discover something 
about herself. She had not been born, nor had she 
lived, amongst these people without knowing some- 
thing about them. 

“An’ is it yeerself has come all the ways from 
Lismore to see him?” he asked. 

165 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“I might have come from Lismore,” she replied 
and smiled again. “But telling you where I come 
from won’t help me to find out what I want to know. 
He told me that his cabin was on Knockshunahal- 
lion — that’s Knockshunahallion, isn’t it?” 

She pointed to the highest peak in the range which, 
even on so clear a day as that, caught the fleece of 
the little clouds as they drifted by. 

“Oh — shure ’tis him that calls himself Anthony 
Sorel,” said he, finding further evasion impossible. 

“Isn’t that his right name?” 

“It is, of course. Wasn’t it the name he wrote 
on Michael Quinn’s piece of paper and they cornin’ 
to a wordy agreement about the cottage the way 
ye’d think Michael was selling him a king’s palace 
in four walls?” 

“How far is it from here?” 

“ ’Twould step about a mile.” 

“Do you think I should be likely to find him 
there?” 

He pushed back his hat and scratched his head. 

“Well — ” said he — “I saw him walkin’ the road 
into Lismore last Tuesda’ an’ would he be back 
by now, I dunno. ’Tis three days he’d be away 
every month, like a thing come and gone out of the 
mist.” 

She felt that Fate was preparing her for disap- 
pointment, yet even so, curiosity was still to be fed. 
Having come so far, at least she wanted to see 
where he lived. Her companion was going that 
way and undertook to show her. 

1 66 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


For some little way, they walked then in silence; 
she on the trodden path, he through the heather at 
her side. 

“ ’Tisn’t often we see the fine gentry from Lis- 
more in these lonesome parts,” he said presently. 

“I suppose not,” she replied. 

“Not unless they be gentlemen and they wid their 
guns and the dogs barkin’ across the face of the 
moors.” 

“Does Anthony Sorel come up here for the shoot- 
ing then?” she asked and found the name lingering 
on her lips as one who tries the taste of something 
in his mouth. 

“Shure, he does not. Doesn’t he live here the 
year round.” 

“What does he do then?” 

He looked up at her as though that were a strange 
question to hear. 

“What would a man be doin’ in the mountains,” 
he asked, “and he havin’ the songs of all the four 
winds to be tellin’ himself?” 

“Is he a poet?” 

“He is indeed, an’ ’tis women with the beauty in 
their face would be sittin’ through the long night to 
hear the music of the words that come out of him 
an’ he speakin’ the sorrows of Ireland an’ the shad- 
ows of death till the tears would bring salt to the 
drought of yeer lips.” 

He stopped and pointed to a little whitewashed 
cabin that hung on the side of the hill above them. 

“There he lives,” said he and then he added enig- 
167 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


matlcally: “ ’Tis a woman with the fall .of night in 
her eyes will come one day knockin’ at his door an’ 
he stretchin’ out his arms the way she’ll find the 
world in them.” 

This he said, standing there like a prophet on the 
slope of the land, and then he left her. 

With a strange feeling in her heart, outgrowing 
curiosity, she climbed upwards to where the cabin 
stood. A wall of sullen rock rose up behind it. It 
was perched there upon the mountainside looking 
down through a gap into the far valley below, like 
a bird leaning against the wind. 

The door was closed, the window shut and there 
she stood, her whole mind drawn in some mysterious 
attraction to the thought of the man who lived there. 
With what she knew herself, with what the old man 
had just told her, there was little to set the imagina- 
tion upon. And yet never had she felt life to be so 
palpitating with possibility as then. 

As if to set it in motion and before she could turn 
away, the door of the cabin had opened and there 
stood Anthony Sorel, cut clear against the blackness 
within. 


CHAPTER VII 


I T may have been in those moments as they stood 
looking at each other that Anthony Sorel saw 
some swift vision of the destiny before him; and 
Anna Quartermaine no less than he of her own. 
Certain it was a long passage of time at such a junc- 
ture before he spoke. And then, when his voice 
came from him, it was as one who speaks, thinking 
he sees the spirit rather than the substance. What 
with confusion and astonishment, she was as much 
disconcerted as he . 1 

“What do you want?” he said at last, just as if 
she were a ghost that had come to trouble him. 
She looked up at his eyes and answered in the same 
uncertain voice. 

“I don’t want anything,” she said and could not 
fasten her mind upon the actual fact of her being 
there or why she had come, but was obsessed only 
by the absorbing strangeness of him and of his life. 
He had told her that he lived alone there in the 
mountains, yet only now, as he came out of the door 
of his cabin, had she realized how much alone and 
how absolutely aloof he was. 

1 As Malachi described her to me, recounting this moment of his 
story: “She stood there eyein’ him, with the wind tossin* her hair, 
and her two feet like shtones on the mountain, the way the blood 
was drawn out cold in them, an* she countin’ the leps of her heart 
like one countin’ their beads in the fear of death.” — E. T. T. 

169 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“Why do you come here then?” he continued. 
Without any harshness in his voice, the question yet 
had some odor of reproof. She felt somehow pow- 
erless to resent it, however, as if a priest had accused 
her of trespass in the sacred and secluded cloisters 
of a church. What was more, as if to a priest, she 
found herself answering the simple truth. 

“I wanted to see where you lived,” said she. 

“Why?” 

“I was curious, I suppose.” 

He threw wide open the door he had half closed 
behind him and the gesture, simple and undramatic 
as it was, had the fullness of power to her. She 
could not have misunderstood it; she could have 
needed of it no other explanation. Without a word 
she accepted the invitation and walked into the cabin. 

Had she expected much, little was there to fulfill 
her expectations. But she was not conscious of hav- 
ing expected anything. His personality was there, 
making all that atmosphere about her. The sim- 
plicity of everything, the plain bed, in which old 
Heggarty had died, with its patchwork quilt covering 
the bedclothes, the simple furniture he had bought 
in Fermoy, the Russian crucifix in the chimney cor- 
ner, it was all no less wonderful to her than if the 
room had been as the imagination of Shauneen Troy 
had seen it. It was the man and his life that colored 
everything she saw. The chairs upon which he sat, 
the bed on which he slept, the table at which he ate 
his meals, associated themselves in her mind with 
the strange loneliness of his being. She stared at 
170 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


them all and round about the room as though every- 
thing, valueless in itself, were of absorbing and 
peculiar interest. 

When she brought her eyes back, looking to him, 
he took her gaze to be inquiry and said, “This is 
all — ” as though he supposed she had expected more. 

It was not easy after that to break into usual con- 
versation such as would have been possible under 
more ordinary circumstances. She felt she ought to 
apologize for her curiosity; had come so far to it 
as the framing of the words upon her lips but could 
not utter them. The formality of that apology 
seemed ludicrous as she contemplated it. So, still 
she stood, looking first at him, then at the room 
about her, in that way as when a child is discovered 
in its guilt and awaits the proclamation of punish- 
ment. This was the strange power of his presence 
beside her. All that she thought of seemed folly to 
say. 

When he broke the spell of that and spoke, it was 
only to add another, the mysterious quality of his 
voice. She had been aware of it before, when they 
had spoken on the mountainside. Now, within 
those four walls, it was intensified. She found her- 
self listening for the sound of it as she might be 
listening to music, sensitive to the note of its quiet 
restraint. 

“Now you have seen all that is to be seen,” he 
said. 

The suggestion of resentment in that, not in his 
voice, but in the mere words as he used them, urged 
12 iyi 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


her at least to dispel it. He was dismissing her and, 
with so little accomplished, she refused to be dis- 
missed. 

“But I understand nothing at all that might be 
understood,” she replied, half concealing the au- 
dacity of that in the gentleness of her voice, soften- 
ing it in the light of her smile. 

He succumbed to neither. There had been no 
resentment in him. Of such a humor as this, his 
conscience was wholly free. In those two years of 
his solitude, his mind had found that quietness which 
is not easily stirred to impulsive reaction. He 
scarcely even asked himself, beyond those questions 
he had put to her, why she had come so far into the 
mountains and with this paltry pretext, just to see 
where he lived. He did not even realize how de- 
liberately beautiful she was, but stood there in those 
first moments, merely wondering when she would go. 

She understood nothing, she said. Well — what 
was there to understand? He asked her that. What 
was there to understand? 

“Why you live here,” she answered and reminded 
him how he had invited her curiosity when they had 
first met. She recalled the words to his mind. “You 
asked me to think over it,” she said — “whether you 
were queer or not.” 

“Well?” said he. 

“Well — I have thought about it and perhaps 
you’re not — queer — but all the same I don’t under- 
stand. I suppose it’s because you’re a poet and 
want to be close to Nature — but why do you ignore 
172 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


human nature? Why do you cut yourself so abso- 
lutely adrift from the world?” 

“Who told you I wrote poetry?” he asked. 

“An old man coming across the mountains.” 

“Old Malachi.” 

“He didn’t tell me his name.” 

“It was Malachi,” he repeated. “But he’s more 
of a poet than I shall ever be. I’ve tried to take 
down some of the things he says to me, the tales 
he tells of the faeries and all the strange things 
that happen in these mountains and when I come to 
read them over afterwards, I know that they are 
more instinct with the sense of poetry than anything 
I shall ever do — unless I succeed.” 

She was quick to know that in his hesitation he 
had spoken of something that was secret to himself. 
If he succeeded — that was the first confession he 
had made. At once she asked him what he meant 
by that but his answer only confused her the more. 

He told her indefinitely of desires to overcome 
the despotism of life, as one who rises against estab- 
lished government and flings his soul into the tumult 
of revolution. Nothing that she called humanity, 
the humanity she had accustomed herself to deal 
with, was to be found in him as yet. He spoke of 
motives that only bewildered her; but notwithstand- 
ing, as he made them glowing with words, she felt 
behind it all some mystery of meaning full of an 
absorbing interest it was impossible to deny. 

This effect it had upon her, that now she was 
determined to understand it all. The very sen- 
173 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


sitiveness of him enticed her. The element of mys- 
tery in him urged her on. She put forth all those 
powers of sympathy of which the will of a woman 
is capable; at one moment a child eager to learn 
and again maternal in her readiness to hear. 

So long had he lived apart from the ways of 
women, that Anthony Sorel drifted into confession 
as one who succumbs to the peaceful narcotic of a 
drug. When she asked if she might hear his poetry, 
he rose, like a child, and went to a drawer of the 
dresser that stood against the wall, bringing out a 
sheaf of papers covered with that same illegible 
writing they had deciphered with such difficulty on 
Michael Quinn’s agreement. 

One after another he read them to her until the 
sound of his voice and the beauty of the words be- 
came as one in her ears and had with them all the 
charm of music that nurses and thrills the emotions 
from sleep to wakefulness. She knew she was fast 
falling under the spell of romantic enchantment. 
Here it truly seemed was a man who could be all 
things. In the spirit of him was all the ring and 
adventurousness of life. In a fierce tumult, she felt 
he could ride out into the hour of battle, yet turn 
to such gentleness as she had never experienced be- 
fore. 

With a passive willingness, she let the spell of 
it surround and envelop her until, as she listened, 
there was one poem that he read, to which the swift 
heat of a jealous apprehension brought sudden reac- 
tion. 


174 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“I gave my spirit to a bird in flight, 

And watched it soaring ever out of sight ; 

Till, like a fountain’s spray in summer heat, 

All palpitating fell its singing at my feet. 

“There in the arch of the abundant sky, 

Where other spirits are forever passing by, 

My soul leaned out into the amazing blue, 

And found the imperishable soul of you.” 

She let him read on, but with a bitter conviction 
that the enchantment was ended. The mind that 
had conceived those words had fixed a gulf between 
itself and her. There was some woman — how could 
she ever have doubted it? — laying her claim to him. 
A glance at his face, sensitive and emotional, how- 
ever stern and ascetic it might be too, had promised 
enough in their first meeting to convince her of the 
passionate and relentless lover he could be. With 
quick intuitive calculations, she surmised the roman- 
tic purpose of his solitude, counting herself before 
a far more formidable rival than this celibate asceti- 
cism with which he had dammed the stream of Na- 
ture in his being. 

Nevertheless, she let him finish before she spoke, 
saying to herself, as she had said to Father Nolan, 
that it was not she who would rob a church, yet 
thinking bitterly no less of the woman who gave 
him sanctuary. 

“I gave my spirit to a bird in flight; 

Its wings are caught now in a passion’s plight — 

I 75 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


And gone are all the truths I ever knew, 

And gone is the immeasurable soul of you.” 

She looked up, as he looked up, resetting in that 
single instant all her surest calculations; seeing him 
bereft of sanctuary, no longer the church she would 
not rob, but now, as Father Nolan had said, the 
priest whose love her nature must command. 

“Have you lost her long?” she asked gently. 

“Lost whom?” 

He put the paper down and stared with question- 
ing eyes — almost as children look. 

“The woman you loved?” 

One by one he picked the papers up and took them 
to the drawer of the dresser and stood there, arrang- 
ing them as he put them back, with that hesitation 
of movement which shows the deep preoccupation 
of the mind. 

But she would not be denied. If he had chosen 
silence to avoid her question, it availed him noth- 
ing. 

“Is that why you live here?” she asked and with 
that note of sympathy which soothes, invites, 
caresses. There was no need to bring it to her voice. 
There it was. She felt sympathy drawn from her to 
the silent figure of him struggling, as she knew he 
was, against himself, to keep the virtue and the vigor 
of his solitude. 

“Didn’t you come here, up into the mountains,” 
sfie persisted gently, “because you wanted to for- 
get her? Wasn’t that it?” 

176 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“And gone were all the truths I ever knew, 

And gone was the imperishable soul of you.” 

She could quote the lines without hesitation or 
mistake. The sound of them in her voice brought 
him round to her. Nothing had made him realize 
her sympathy so well as that. 

“There was no woman,” he said, “no woman, like 
that.” 

“Why did you write it then?” 

“Because I believed that of myself at the time. 
I believed I should one day love like that — and 
lose like that. You didn’t understand me a little 
while ago when I talked of the despotism of life. 
That’s why I’m here. I’m trying to forget all 
women, not one. When I first came here I could 
not have given my spirit to a bird in flight. My 
nature is emotional. Perhaps you know that al- 
ready. But emotions like everyone else’s, that bring 
lead into my feet and make a servant of me, not a 
free man. Last time you saw me, I was watching 
the larks rise out of the heather — well, one of these 
days, I shall get freedom like that. It’s only up 
there where the lark rises and the clouds ride in the 
sky that you see things beautiful for the beauty they 
have. Here, a thing is only beautiful for the emo- 
tions it brings you.” 

He stopped suddenly with a gesture of despair as 
though he knew he was speaking the everlasting 
riddle of the universe. With that same gesture 
of despair, he closed the drawer of the dresser and 
177 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


strode to the door, standing there and looking across 
the mountains where the little spring freshets were 
falling white like strands of silver hair between the 
bowlders. 

She let him keep his silence now, knowing that 
he must speak again in such time as the course of 
his thoughts had run. But when he turned, she 
was unprepared for what he had to say. 

“Why did you come up here again,” he asked, 
“reminding me of the things I had forgotten?” 

“What things?” 

“This — this life here — the solitude, the loneliness 
of it.” 

Suddenly he left the door and came back into the 
room, moved by restlessness now. He found a seat 
in the dim light of the chimney corner and sat there 
staring into the fire. As suddenly then, breaking 
his silence as, on an instant’s determination, a man 
might break a sword across his knees, he launched 
forth into an endless confession of his innermost 
self — the speech of a man in whom the pent-up 
silences have broken down, flooding in a torrent of 
words no resistance of the spirit can stem. 

He told her of his life in London and abroad, 
before he came to Knockshunahallion — the confes- 
sion of a child, unsparing and relentless in its cruel 
honesty. 

By slow degrees she saw the thing he had been, a 
creature driven by emotions, yet finding none to 
feed his soul upon, struggling in the drifting sands 
with eyes blinded as he turned them ever to the 
178 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


unapproachable wonder of the sun. It was the 
admission of a life no man she had ever known 
would ask blame for, indeed a greater spirit than 
she had ever met, battling against the unaccountable 
odds. 

It was only when he came to the setting forth of 
his philosophy that she lost sight in the swift and 
upward flights he took. Here he came into the re- 
gions of his mysticism, an atmosphere too rarefied 
for her to breathe. Now he was talking of the 
faeries as a man speaks with familiarity of those 
about him in a strange land. She could see visions 
in his eyes as the words came tumbling from his 
lips. Indeed it was of visions he talked as well, but 
not as one versed in occult practices, burning strange 
incense to numb the senses, seeking for signs, self- 
hypnotized, in a crystal globe. He spoke gently, 
almost with awe, as one who has seen and heard 
and can never forget. This was where she lost 
knowledge of him. This was where she made the 
fatal error in her soul. 

Why, she asked herself, as she listened, why does 
he wish that I had never come again? She could 
not but believe that this outpouring of his mind, 
bringing echoes of life into those pent-up silences, 
was healthful, as they would tell her was confession 
for the soul. 

For now, as with a lark in flight, soaring into the 
blue zenith of the heavens, her mental vision could 
not keep sight of him. He had left her standing 
there on earth, listening only to the words he said 
179 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


with but the faintest comprehension of their mean- 
ing. 

He had chosen this life of a recluse to gain a 
calm, a vigor and a strength of his emotional imagi- 
nation. There, living as a solitary in those moun- 
tains, he was striving to achieve the conquest of mind 
over the sensations of his body. 

The ambition baffled her. She could not follow 
its ultimate gain. There was Nature in her, as in 
all women; she saw no other law. This was the 
madness in him he had bid her seek for when he had 
left her that first day of their meeting. Now she 
had found it, but instead of repelling, it attracted 
her. There was a fascination in all the wild mys- 
ticism he talked. This celibate asceticism he upheld, 
little as she understood it, set her heart beating in 
a tumult of Romance. 

Here was the error that she made, fatal for him ; 
the fatal error ultimately for herself. 

With her knowledge of men, how could she be- 
lieve him when he told her that it was in the soul 
of all men to seek this pathway to the mysterious 
stars? 

“The celibacy of men is a voluntary celibacy,” he 
said to give her proof of it; but with the men she 
had known and the ultimate expressions of their 
emotions, she could but smile reminiscently at that, 
forgetting her Father Nolan in his shelter of the 
church. 

“This is a phase,” she told herself as she listened, 
180 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


clinging to Nature, unshaken in her belief of it. 
But it was a phase she had never met in a man 
before. At least there was no pretense in it. For 
two years he had been alone there in those mountains 
— a Buddha, fasting in the wilderness. But how 
could she believe him when he told her that all men, 
before the despotism of life had made them slaves, 
would so struggle, so endure? 

“Why don’t they then?” she asked. 

“Life seizes a man too swiftly,” said he. “Before 
the mind is awake in him the body has tasted the 
easy joys of a pleasant servitude. How many think 
in time? Bring children up in the world of faeries 
these poor people live in,” he declared, “and watch 
the youth of a man before he touches life. His 
ideals are like swallows flying swift and high. Never 
the earth for them.” 

He would say no more; indeed he had no powers 
of speech in argument. She would have driven him 
to silence had she asked him more. 

“There are meanings the mind has no concern 
with,” he said. “Facts have meanings and facts 
die.” 

He could only speak to her sympathetic listen- 
ing, and then with halting phrases, of the visions 
his soul encountered. When she would reason with 
him this or that, it was like bringing a bird to earth 
with a broken wing. He would turn and look at 
her in helpless silence. 

“But why — ” she said at last — “why did you wish 
181 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


I had not found my way here again? What harm 
have I done? Haven’t I been sympathetic? Do 
you deny yourself even that?” 

He stretched out his hands over the fire as if in 
that there were more of human understanding. 

“Who are you?” he said suddenly. 

She told him, but he listened as though it made 
no matter who she was. Almost before she had 
finished, he was speaking quickly again, telling her 
that she was the despotism of life, reminding him of 
his loneliness, reviving in him the hunger for sym- 
pathetic companionship which in those two years he 
had almost taught his mind to renounce. 

“But are you always going to renounce it?” she 
asked. 

“Who knows what any man is always going to 
do?” said he. “Buddha lived the life of a hermit 
and found that truth was not to be learnt in lonely 
places; then he came out into the world. But it was 
in the lonely places he had first found the calm and 
vigor of his soul. Do you think I ever thought when 
I came alone here into the mountains to find the 
dominion of myself, that I should meet with you? 
Do you think I should have come if I had?” 

“What difference do I make?” she whispered. 

He stood up from his seat by the fire and walked 
again to the door, flinging it wide open, upper and 
lower half of it, so that the sunlight was cut in one 
square patch of gold upon the floor. 

“Come out and walk,” he said, forcing his voice 
to quietness. “Let’s walk up there to where that 
182 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


buzzard is circling high above the peak. All thought 
runs to despotism in cramped spaces like this room. 
Come with me, high up above all this. Then you’ll 
understand.” 

She went obediently to his side and by his side 
walked up the untrodden paths until they stood 
where even the stone-chats would not follow and 
far below them the larks rose out of the heather 
soaring to reach them where they were. 


CHAPTER VIII 


T IMES without number she had been in the 
mountains of Europe, altitudes beside which, 
in comparison, this Knockshunahallion was 
a little hill, yet never did it seem to her she had been 
so high above the world as then. 

Clear as was the day, there were veiling clouds, 
thin scarfs of mist that passed beneath them, now 
hiding the far-off valleys, now revealing them in the 
glamour of the sun. The little cabins and the tiny 
farms were like scraps of white paper, the faintly 
distinguishable trail of life in a paper chase of the 
giants. From those heights she saw the world with 
new eyes and, however dimly, yet there in the faint 
consciousness of her mind came the suspicion of 
what he learnt in his solitude. 

Far away beyond the valley and across the moors 
a thick cluster of trees marked the direction of Bally- 
saggartmore on that living map of green. She 
touched his arm and stretched out her hand, point- 
ing, it seemed to her, across the continent, and said, 
“That’s where I live.” 

His eyes went out to the line of light winding 
through the trees. This was the Blackwater, thread- 
ing emeralds on a string of gold. 

These were the first words which had been spoken 
since they had left his cabin. Then silence sur- 
184 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


rounded them again, a stillness that was a tangible 
thing, a quiet like the hush of children, waiting with 
minds on tiptoe for a story. 

She stood beside him, conscious of the wish to put 
her arm in his, moved by some sense of gratitude for 
the world he showed her. Once her hand moved, 
tentative to do the thing that she desired, but re- 
membrance of his wish that she had never come, 
the knowledge of the struggle that still was a tumult 
in his mind, dropped it again in generosity to her 
side. 

“I must make him forget that I am here at all,” 
she told herself. By that means only, she knew she 
might find leave to come again. This was the first 
time in her life she had ever subdued the egotism 
of her personality. He was the first man who had 
wakened in her that instinct of passive subordina- 
tion, the surest weapon Nature can give into a 
woman’s hands. So it was not she who would break 
the silence now. The wind played gently through 
her hair, a chill wind as it came across the shadows 
of the mountains which even the open sunshine could 
not wholly warm again. Still she did not speak. 

She listened, as she knew he was listening, to the 
sounds of the world that rose so faintly to their 
ears. The song of a lark, the intermittent cry of the 
buzzard wheeling over their heads, the burring mur- 
mur of the mountain streams that tumbled like a 
shower of crystals, shining white into the valley’s 
lap, these were all mingled into a whispering song 
the depth of air had muted as it came to them. But 

185 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


it was more his listening she listened to than the 
sounds themselves. 

Yet she too could feel now the dwindling paltri- 
ness of the common life in such an altitude as that; 
knew what he meant when he had told her how in 
the first few months of his solitude he had striven 
against the fear of loneliness and dreaded the anger 
of the mountain storms. 

‘‘Then,” he had said, “as the days went by and 
I had shaken off the weight of life we carry on our 
shoulders, then I heard such music in the storms at 
night, as no orchestra of a thousand instruments 
could ever play.” 

Standing there with him then, she could believe 
how that was true, yet thought with a clinging pleas- 
ure of the warm room in which at such times she hid 
herself, pulling the heavy curtains and shutting out 
the importunate agonies of the wind. That was 
what he would call the despotism of life. Slowly 
she was beginning to know that his was the higher 
truth, but came no nearer to departure from her 
own. For even then, in a sudden moment of emo- 
tional belief, she said, 

“Up here, I think I could almost believe in 
faeries.” 

And forgetting all the generous intentions of her 
mind but those few moments ago, she slipped her 
arm impulsively, warm and close in his. Only when 
she shivered did she remember what she had done, 
but once there and feeling the warmth of it, she 
could not bring herself to take it away. If that 
1 86 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


were the slavery of life, it was, as he had said, a 
pleasant servitude. High though his truth might 
be, she needed no loftier exaltation than that which 
she already had. 

It may have been a thought for her, for though he 
shivered when her arm touched his, he did not move 
away. 

“This is May Eve,” he said — “the night the fae- 
ries ride out and dance and play their music in all the 
nooks and crevices of these hills. Any stranger 
that knocks at a cottage door to-night, if they should 
unbolt the latch, will be faerie man or woman to, 
those within. They will shut the door against him 
or bid him enter according to the fear and the emo- 
tions in their hearts.” 

Her own belief which was emotional became doubt 
again when she saw the deeper belief in him. So 
long had she regarded this belief in faeries to be a 
country superstition, declaring her faith in them only 
in moments of childish exhilaration, that when she 
came to the real faith such as his, all that exhilara- 
tion left her for the reasoned doubt again. 

She looked up into his eyes, questioning with her 
own but still keeping hold upon his arm. 

“Do you really mean to say,” she murmured, 
“that faeries do come to people’s doors; that there 
are people who actually see them, speak with them, 
give them shelter or turn them away? Surely isn’t 
it all a superstition? Isn’t it the unbalanced rea- 
son of a terrible ignorance that makes people see 
these things?” 

13 


187 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


He shook his head. 

“Those are only words,” he answered her. “Ig- 
norance, superstition, they are only words with rela- 
tive meanings. You are ignorant of the ways of 
the world, but you may have great knowledge of the 
ways of God; you are ignorant of the meaning and 
beauties of music but none may know better than you 
what the curlew means when he cries through the 
mist across the lonely bogland. None better than 
you may hear the music in his mournful note. You 
are utterly ignorant of the emotions that fret and 
drive your soul, but none may know better than you 
the power of faeries in the solitary corners of the 
world. In a few hours when the evening falls I 
will bring you down into the valley and show you 
one who knows nothing of the fatal emotions that 
beset her but whose ears hear plainer than ours the 
sound of faerie music which is the very spirit of the 
Fate that hangs about her. Will you come?” 

“Shall I be afraid?” she asked. 

“Fear is worse than ignorance,” said he. “Will 
you come?” 

She closed her fingers on his arm and bent her 
head. 


CHAPTER IX 


W HEN the sun was falling behind Kilworth, 
and as the dropping light of it cast those 
first, soft, long rays of the glowing gold 
of evening along the green banks of the Duag val- 
ley, Anthony Sorel brought her down the mountain 
side to Gorteeshall. Then the shadows were length- 
ening — lengthening into giant arms that stretched 
lingeringly over the breast of the earth before it fell 
asleep. 

“I will show you an adventure where the faeries 
are concerned,” he had said and when below them 
the valley spread out its fields of green, bound with 
that twisting ribbon of the river Duag, he pointed 
to a white-washed cottage from which the blue smoke 
rose above the thatch in one straight column to the 
evening sky. 

“There,” he said, touching her arm, so that she 
stood beside him — “there in that cottage lives a girl 
with more beauty in her face than they have ever 
seen in these mountains for many a day.” 

She looked at him quickly. 

“Do you think she’s beautiful?” she asked. 
Perhaps he did not see that look; certainly he 
never knew its meaning. 

“I think her beautiful — yes,” he replied. “I 
think sometimes it is the most beautiful face I’ve 
189 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


ever seen. Often I’ve stood watching her at the 
cross roads where she used to dance with the other 
girls and young men about. They know little of 
the grace of dancing, which after all is only a grace 
of the body not a grace of mind. It’s their minds 
have grace. But she had elegance of movement 
too.” 

“You were attracted to her?” she said, half in 
question, half in the way women make statements 
of those things that women know. 

He took no notice of that and continued speaking. 
She could not be sure if it were that he had avoided 
answering or if it were simply that he had not heard. 

“What came to her,” he went on, “happened 
about two weeks ago, over there at the spot where 
you see those roads cross like ropes tying the fields 
together. She says for some moments, as the light 
of the evening was dying she heard music other 
than that which the old man was playing for the 
dancing on his fiddle. Her feet got caught in it, 
she said, so that she could not keep time with the 
fiddler’s music. Indeed the young man who was 
dancing with her at the time assured me that she 
was all out of step — not a fault she could ever be 
accused of. Then, as the darkness came on, she 
saw a light in the field that moved in and out amongst 
the cows that were grazing there. It was not curi- 
osity she felt, she told me, but, so well as I can 
gather, an irresistible impulse that induced her to 
follow it. She left the dancing and went into the 
field and the light danced before her, always some 
190 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


few yards away. It must have dazzled her eyes 
and so preoccupied her that she could not see where 
she was going, for she fell down a gravel pit that 
had been dug a few days before for some purpose 
or other and, falling, she broke her leg. At first, 
she said she felt no pain. She was only distressed 
because the light was no longer visible. But after 
a time, when she heard an end to the music at the 
cross roads, the pain became almost unbearable. She 
cried out and so it was they found her lying there. 
There she is now, in a bed in that cottage where her 
mother lives with her and when I’ve told you all 
about her, I’ll take you down there. You shall see 
her. You shall see the concerns of faeries.” 

“Was it faerie music then? Was it a light of the 
faeries too?” 

She asked now with the voice of one eager to be- 
lieve. The way he spoke conquered her incredu- 
lity. There was a spell in the strange music of his 
voice ; she felt it growing upon her as a hidden mo- 
tive in a symphony steals into the consciousness of 
the mind. 

“That is what they say,” he replied — “what they 
believe. Youth and beauty are ever in danger of 
being taken by the faeries and the old woman, her 
mother, so they tell, has speech with them. The 
people about here have no love of passing her cot- 
tage after dark. But listen to what happens now. 
Mary’s leg is so badly broken that the doctor 
from Clogheen has said that it must be amputated 
or she is sure to come by her death. He is not cer- 
191 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


tain enough of his skill to guarantee that even this 
will save her life though he knows it is the only- 
possible thing to do. But there is a spell upon Mary 
ever since she heard that music and saw that light. 
She declares she will not have her beauty spoilt. 
The doctor has tried to insist that the amputation 
must be made, whereupon Mary’s mother has de- 
creed that she will prosecute him if the operation 
is not successful. This has frightened him. He has 
not the courage of his skill to persevere and there 
she lies on a bed of terrible suffering in that cot- 
tage, listening to the music she still hears and 
doomed to die, the doctor tells me. Nothing can 
possibly save her. That is how the faeries have 
concerned themselves with Mary Coyne.” 

She stood there beside him on the slope of the 
mountain, looking now at the cottage with its col- 
umn of dim blue smoke, now at his face, set across 
the far line of the valley, now at the cottage again. 

It did not occur to her to ask him if he believed 
the story he had just told her, but, as they went on 
again down the hillside, she asked him, with that 
same note of tentative restraint in her voice, what he 
understood of it all. 

“She has the emotions of her own beauty,” he 
said. “They are bringing her death. That is how 
these mountain people come near the truth. They 
have the power of vision to see the symbols of their 
own emotions. Her beauty is her own destruction. 
I have seen that in her eyes as she looked at me.” 

In the blindness of her mind, she understood his 
192 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


answer, though none of it was clear to the conscious- 
ness of reason. 

The music that Mary Coyne had heard in her 
ears, the dancing, luring light she had seen, these 
were symbols of her own fatal emotions. This was 
what Anna Quartermaine dimly divined he must 
mean, but could not have put it into words and so 
kept silence as she walked beside him. Whether 
he thought the light and the music were real things 
of faerie she could not have said. She could not 
have been assured that she did not believe them 
real herself. 

The golden light of the evening had died through 
purple grays to darkness as they reached the cot- 
tage door. Anthony Sorel knocked upon the panel 
and, after a few minutes, the upper half was opened, 
when they could see an old woman, with short gray 
hair clipped close around her neck, looking like a 
halo about her pale face with its sharp and almost 
aristocratic features. It was not difficult to see that 
she had been beautiful once herself. But it was 
her eyes more than her beauty which, in that first 
moment, drew all the attention of Anna Quarter- 
maine. 

With a glance too swift almost to be seen, the old 
woman had recognized Anthony Sorel and then her 
gaze had fallen upon his companion. So Anna 
Quartermaine could fully see her eyes, the vivid 
penetration of them, but lit with no ordinary light 
of reason or curiosity. Indeed they seemed to be 
searching for thoughts and substances which were 
193 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


beyond the mind to comprehend. Could that look 
have been translated into words, to Anna Quar- 
termaine it must have been some foreign tongue she 
could not understand. 

Anthony Sorel bid her good evening. At the 
sound of his voice she withdrew the gaze of her 
eyes, opened the lower part of the door and made 
way for them to enter. 

It was a cottage just as any other you will see in 
the south of Ireland. One further room, a bed- 
room, there was, beyond the kitchen into which they 
came. The door of it was open. There was the 
bed on which Mary Coyne lay dying. Anthony 
Sorel walked quietly into the room and stood beside 
her. Anna Quartermaine followed him. For an 
instant she had half turned, hesitating, but with a 
quick understanding, Mrs. Coyne had urged her, 
muttering she was welcome. 

So she stood at the foot of the untidy bed, look- 
ing down at the face on the crumpled pillow. It 
was indeed, even in those moments, intensely beauti- 
ful, so beautiful that she did not even in her mind’s 
eye need to re-dress the disordered hair or think 
how much improvement she could make in it with 
the addition of faintest color to the cheeks. For 
as well as beauty there was in her eyes the strange 
and wild exhilaration of death, as if it were a lover 
about to take her for the first time into the pas- 
sionate embrace of his arms. The look of expec- 
tancy was there and, shy in the anticipation of it, 
she almost held her breath. 

194 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


Instinctively she looked at Anthony Sorel. His 
eyes were steady and emotionless as though he knew 
of the approach of death and heard its footsteps 
in the room beyond. She sought for the look of ad- 
miration she expected or for that agony which must 
be seen in his eyes as a man gazes upon beauty that 
he loves when it joins hands with death. But no 
such expressions were there. His face was calm. 
His eyes bent steadily on those of Mary Coyne 
and she looked up at him as though saying, “Am I 
not beautiful, even more beautiful so near to death?”' 

“Is the music still playing for you, Mary?” he 
asked presently. 

“I heard it last night,” she said, “an’ it callin’ 
me through the window beyond, the way I’d be set- 
tin’ me foot to ut if the leg wasn’t broken on me.” 

“What was it like?” 

“Like the strings of a fiddle that would be made 
of woman’s hair an’ weren’t all the sorrows of the 
world in ut like the wind that scatters the thistle- 
down and sobs under the warp of the old door?” 

“Do you feel any better in yourself?” he asked 
her then. 

She turned over with much pain upon her side 
and moaned softly as she did so. 

“I do not,” said she, “an’ if death is to be cornin’ 
to me, wouldn’t it come swift in the night while I’d 
be hearin’ the music, the way I’d be havin’ all the 
beauty I had with me again an’ I not cramped here 
on the bed like an old hag lettin’ the last gasps out 
of her.” 


195 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


He turned away from the bedside and motioning 
to Mrs. Coyne she followed him with Anna Quarter- 
maine into the other room. When he had closed 
the door of the bedroom, he returned and stood be- 
side the fire. 

“Mary will die,” said he to the old woman, “and 
’twill be her beauty killed her.” 

Mrs. Coyne wrung her hands but there were no 
tears in her eyes. She wrung her hands in a hard 
passion of grief. 

“Haven’t they set their spell on her,” she cried, 
“and what could I be doing for the girl if they’ve 
put their minds on takin’ her!” 

“Insist on the doctor doing his operation,” he 
replied quietly. “That is the only hope of saving 
her. Any day, any moment it may be too late. 
Come, come — we all know there are faeries and this 
is the work of faeries no doubt — but people say you 
have the power to deal with them. If she does lose 
her beauty and has to be walking the world with 
crutches to help her, isn’t that better than to be los- 
ing her?” 

Anna Quartermaine listened but all her senses 
were now faint and subdued in her as though she 
breathed an atmosphere heavy with sleep. The 
sound of his voice was like a far note continuous in 
her ears, but it was with difficulty she could reason 
what he said. Did he know then, she asked herself, 
did he know there were faeries or was his speech 
only to humor the woman? She looked up at him 
standing there and it seemed to her as if the strength 
196 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


and calmness of his mind was stronger than all the 
common power of men. This was more than the 
mere adventure of Romance she had sought for, to 
pass the hours of Spring into the long days of Sum- 
mer. Her heart was not beating quickly, but the 
heavy throb of it was loud like a hammer in her 
pulse. 

Had there been a sign of his admiration for that 
dying girl within she would have known he was yet 
the same as other men. But no such sign had there 
been. He had spoken of her beauty; he had looked 
at it as though it were a flower he had found on the 
mountainside — a thing he would resist the pluck- 
ing to wear for his own adornment. Even when 
Mrs. Coyne returned her answer to his urging, Anna 
Quartermaine kept her eyes set on Anthony Sorel’s 
face, hearing, only as if it were in the distance, what 
she said. 

“Why would I be lettin’ the doctor use his knife 
to her,” she began. “Isn’t she a sick enough one as 
it is? Shure, wouldn’t they take the leg away wid 
them to be doing tricks wid it there in Clogheen, 
the way they bought Tim Coughlan’s body for the 
hospital in Dublin an’ paid his woman two pounds 
for it an’ she drinkin’ every penny of it to drown 
the shame it brought her? Glory be to the Almighty 
God, wouldn’t I sooner see herself goin’ wid the 
faeries, than standin’ up on the last day wid one leg 
to her an’ she shamed of her beauty before God 
Himself!” 

In this strain, slowly working upon her own un- 
197 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


bridled emotions, it seemed she talked without end- 
ing and all the while Anna Quartermaine watched 
Anthony Sorel’s face. It was full of a sensitive mo- 
bility, and to all that the old woman said, the expres- 
sion of his lips and eyes reflected her words as one 
plays upon some instrument his hand was born to. 

Then gradually in the growing passion of her 
words, the note in the old woman’s voice became a 
note of frenzy. At the sound of it, but with no sense 
of fear, Anna Quartermaine turned to look at her. 
Saliva was gathered in a froth of bubbles at the cor- 
ners of her wrinkled mouth, her eyes were flashing 
with the daring confidence of prophecy. They were 
fixed upon Anthony Sorel’s face as if with just the 
light in them she would burn out his soul. 

It was not till then that a consciousness of fear 
took the mind of Anna Quartermaine. With a sud- 
den movement, she caught Anthony Sorel’s hand 
and held it fast. 

“Let us go,” she whispered — “please let us go.” 

For swiftly it had come to her mind that the old 
woman was mad. It was no uncommon thing 
amongst those people with the loneliness of their 
lives and hers was not an unnatural dread of it. 

“Let us go,” she whispered again and stood up 
beside him. 

“You’ve nothing to fear,” he replied quietly and 
took a closer hold upon her hand. “Let her go on, 
she speaks with authority.” 

“An’ wouldn’t I speak well with the gift of 
sight,” she cried, “an’ on this night when the hosts 
198 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


of them do be ridin’ out with their horses gallopin 
thunder over the heather ! Wouldn’t I know ye well 
as ye sthand there, wouldn’t I know ye well to be 
eaten up with wisdom an’ still not be wise, to be ever 
watching with yeer quiet eyes an’ still be blind, to 
be listenin’ the way of a dog an’ he huntin’ an’ still 
be deaf? I would indeed ! Is it that sort of wisdom 
ye’d be preachin’ to herself in there? Yirra, ’tis not 
that sort of wisdom will be sthandin’ to ye an’ ye 
taken by the faeries yeerself where the roads are 
crossed an’ the night comes batterin’ with the wind 
across the mountains at yeer little door. Hear what 
I say, young man, before ye preach the cunnin’ ways 
of thim doctors to me, for isn’t there the speech 
of knowledge in me this night an’ wouldn’t I 
be walkin’ the hills with me two feet bare on me 
before I’d know the words again I’d be sayin’ to 
ye now?” 

With a sudden movement and still in her frenzy, 
she turned her eyes on Anna Quartermaine who in- 
voluntarily clung the closer to Anthony Sorel’s side. 

“Who are ye?” she asked. “Who are ye, cornin’ 
with yeer own beauty to spy out the face of herself 
beyond in the room on her little bed?” 

Knowing it was the truth, Anna Quartermaine 
shuddered, fearing the things she still might say. 

“I brought this lady,” Anthony Sorel replied. 
“She did not come of herself. I brought her. Your 
sight is failing you. Your moment is going. Get 
back to your daughter and do what I advise you 
or send for the priest if you need him.” 

199 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


At that she beat her hands upon her head and 
stamped her foot upon the hard mud floor. 

“The sight is not gone from me!” she cried. 
“Haven’t I vision now can see the cornin’ of the days, 
an’ the break of mornin’ when death will be cornin’ 
to herself sthandin’ there an’ she dreamin’ the world 
away of a lover with his arms around the soft white 
breast of her. Let ye go out the both of ye an’ 
dare the faeries that do be dancin’ everywhere this 
night. ’Tis ye have wisdom an’ are still not wise 
— ’tis ye look strainin’ with yeer eyes an’ cannot 
see.” 

This was the last effort of her speech. As though 
a hand had been pressed against her lips she stopped 
suddenly in speaking; as though some hidden power 
had seized her, she dropped with her frenzy spent 
upon the floor. 

Without a word Anthony Sorel lifted her in his 
arms and carried her to her bed in the other room. 
When he came back, Anna Quartermaine could see 
that his face was white. Indeed, she felt the blood- 
lessness in her own. Then he took her arm and led 
her to the door. They passed out into the dark- 
ness that the moon was faintly glimmering with 
light. He fastened the latch and so they turned up 
the mountainside again. For a long while he spoke 
no word and then he said, 

“Mary Coyne will die this night.” 

After that between them nothing else was said 
until he set her on the road to Ballysaggartmore. 


CHAPTER X 


I T was as he walked back across the moors and 
up the half-trodden pathways again into the 
mountains that Anthony Sorel knew some 
change had come upon him that day. 

At first he was slow to realize what it was or how 
it had happened. Ideas moved strangely in his 
mind but he could not trace their passage, or know 
whence they had come. It was long he found the 
way back to his cabin and his eyes that had grown 
so accustomed to those gray lights before the moon 
had risen were now restless because everything 
seemed dark. The far edges of the hills cut sharp 
metallic lines against the purple sky; the snipe that 
rose with a quick cry and a rush of wings out of the 
bracken as he crossed the moor set the heart beat- 
ing suddenly within him. It seemed a vast world, 
that black space into which it flung itself as it dis- 
appeared in search of another bed to sleep in undis- 
turbed. 

When he reached his cabin, he opened the door 
and went in, for long minutes standing there with 
the catch still in his hand looking at the chair Anna 
Quartermaine had occupied. There it remained, 
turned to the fire, just where she had sat and lis- 
tened to the wandering story he had told her. With 
the long habits of solitude, his mind drifted with- 
201 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


out direction in countless channels. Then his eyes 
were looking inwards, as when a man is caught 
between the worlds of belief and imagination. 

At last, closing the door, with an abstracted care, 
he set the room to rights, yet still was restless, with 
no thought of sleep. The fire was burnt out to the 
dim glow behind white ashes. Another night he 
would have got to his bed, letting it die and be bur- 
ied in its own cold embers; but now he sat beside the 
bellows-wheel and blew the ashes into a flame of 
more cheerful companionship. Even then there 
passed an hour by before he lay himself down with 
eyes turned to the wall, where the firelights danced 
until it seemed they were a ring of the children of 
faerie dancing around him, nearer and nearer until 
their little feet had closed his eyes. 

In the morning the sun wakened him and the 
knowledge of that change was with him still. It was 
not that he was watching the movements of his mind, 
for the change seemed without him, rather than 
within. He looked around the room of his cabin 
and was conscious of the four walls that contained 
it. As though he were an onlooker from some 
more distant place, he stood aside and could see 
himself living there alone, from one day, from one 
night to another, through the seasons, through the 
years — always alone. 

What had brought that change in him? He was 
too ignorant of himself to tell. It was not in his 
emotions, for the sensation all through his body, 
even to his mind, was as if he moved, saw, felt, all 
202 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


in a trance. Yet at moments his heart beat quickly 
as when he wondered to himself why Anna Quar- 
termaine had come across the moors and up 
those mountain paths to see the place in which he 
lived. 

He blamed himself for talking as he did; for let- 
ting his mind be so disturbed with thoughts of her. 
Yet continually he was knowing that through all he 
had said, she had made him feel the higher inten- 
tions of his soul’s endeavor. As her face stood there 
in his memory, for not one feature needed the call- 
ing to his mind, he knew that, even in her gentle 
disbelief, she had brought strength and vigor to 
his loftiest purpose. 

And so his thoughts were cause as the day wore 
on, no longer for him to regard himself with blame, 
but a growing joy that now he could look into a 
woman’s eyes without the tumult of emotion he had 
known before, but binding the uplifting of his spirit 
to the noblest of ideals. 

This, in those two long years, was the first test of 
what solitude and fasting of his body had brought 
him. So it was not the sudden change he had found, 
but the gradual transformation she had discovered 
for him in himself. This was what indeed he had 
become, for now he knew his mind was calm above 
the distress and hunger of desire. Never might he 
see her again and yet the beauty his imagination 
made in her, far passed the deliberate beauty in her 
face. So he knew a man might love a woman, when 
earthly beauty had long left her and no distressing 
14 203 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

hand of Death could rob her of the beauty that he 
saw. 

In an ecstasy at the thought that so he too might 
love Anna Quartermaine, he threw open his cabin 
door, strode out into the light of day and climbed 
through the banks of sunshine to the peaks where 
they had stood together. 

“There’s where I live,” she had said and still he 
could see the whiteness of her hand that looked so 
small and yet so strong to point across the world be- 
neath them. 

That was where she lived and there, seating him- 
self on the tough mountain grass, he turned his eyes 
and gave that spirit he had written of, to a bird in 
flight, that bore him upwards and upwards until 
his soul leaned out and found such beauty in these 
new-found thoughts of her, as made death seem a 
little thing beside. 

Each day he went there to the summit of Knock- 
shunahallion and now was spurred to energies his 
mind had never known for all the days of those 
two solitary years. Lying out there, sometimes the 
peak an island alone above the sunny mists that 
drifted past below, he wrote his songs and spoke 
them out as though she in her valley could hear his 
voice across the moors. 

A day will rise in the golden dawn, 

When the mists swim into the sea of morn, 

And the naked sun under Knocknashoul 
Will steep his limbs in the mountain pool — 

On such a day will my love be born. 

204 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


A day will come, though the days are late, 

When I hold your hand as those that wait 
With bell and monstrance and Holy Bread, 

Who take God’s cup to the Altar head 
And lift it high at the Holy Gate. 

A day will dawn when I may gaze 
Beyond the day of other days, 

And looking deep within your eyes 
Shall find the world were ne’er so wise, 

Knowing death cannot part our ways. 

This he wrote, and many of the love poems com- 
piled in that one book of songs he made. 

It was on the fourth day, when the evening drew 
in about him and he saw the light kindled in Mala- 
chi’s cottage on Crow Hill, that he gathered all the 
songs he had written and came down the mountain, 
leaping over the bowlders and striding heedlessly 
over the hidden paths, for the joy of life that was 
in him. 

To his knocking on the door, Malachi came and 
let him in, and closed the door behind him and drew 
out the chair from by the dresser where he was used 
to sit and he reading his songs in the night-time. 

It was not until he had heard them all and had 
turned the tobacco in his mouth and spat three times 
into the fire that Malachi spoke. 

“Isn’t it the plovers go winding over the fields 
and the moors,” said he, “and they crying out their 
songs on the windy nights till they’d be finding a 
mate would make her nest wid ’em? Yirra, Glory 
205 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


be to God, hadn’t I hopes of ye and ye makin’ yeer 
songs out of the wonders of the western world? 
And now ’tis herself, and didn’t I see her and she 
coming out of great places in Lismore looking for 
ye, ’tis herself has set the spell of her eyes on ye the 
way ye’ll be swimming the waters and walking the 
land to get to her. And won’t she bring the silence 
into yeer voice that would sing like a blackbird in 
a thorn bush when the white blossom is dhropping to 
the ground? Won’t she be persuading ye ’tis the 
world in herself, and ye looking in her eyes like a 
young calf hungry for its mother and all the strength 
in ye goin’ out like water dhropping.” 

He put away the verses he had gathered and 
swore his oath to Malachi that it was not so. 

“Is it the way ye’ll never see her again?” Malachi 
asked and his voice was bitter as the taste of aloes is. 

He could not give promise to that. He had left 
her alone on the road that night. He had strode off 
into the darkness and never a word of good-bye had 
he said because of the fear of the thing he had 
learnt that day. But now he knew, and gave his 
oath, that he loved almost as he had wished for love 
and every thought in him was above desire and his 
heart would be strong until that day when he could 
give her the mastery of himself. 

“I shall say good-bye,” he said, “and she will 
know why I go and the day when I shall come back. 
And the thought of her will be about me through the 
nights and I shall come the faster through her to 
the end of my servitude.” 

206 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


Malachi stirred the fire with an iron rod. Then 
he took the handle of the bellows-wheel in his hand 
and for long moments they watched the sparks gath- 
ering out of the peat and flying upwards into the 
black heart of the chimney. 

“Let ye not be goin’ down from the mountains to 
herself,” said he at last. “That word of parting is 
not a word the women will listen to. Won’t it set 
the eyes of her more surely on ye and she stretching 
out her hand in the darkness and her voice crying 
out to ye across the windy places of the hills? For 
once ye say that word to a woman doesn’t it put the 
badness in her blood would burn and starve her soul 
till not the winds nor the storms nor the lonesome- 
ness of the way would be keepin’ her from ye?” 

“Still I must go,” Anthony Sorel replied, “for 
then I shall know what strength there is in me and 
how near I may be to the hour when I can love 
with fulfillment that is not the satisfied hunger of 
desire. I shall say good-bye and I shall come away 
and then one day when the tumult of life is gone 
from me, I shall come down the mountain again to 
find her.” 

“ ’Tis not a woman will wait for that,” said 
Malachi. 

“Then at least I shall know I have loved,” said 
Anthony Sorel — “and can a man know more?” 

Malachi stood up and beat his fist upon the wall. 

“Ye have the songs and all the beauty of the 
world,” said he, “and there are voices in the silence 
of the hills for ye and there are truths a man can’t 
207 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


see but he walks about from one place to another 
till his days be over him and yeerself would go to 
the call of a woman an’ she beckonin’ ye to the white 
gentleness of her breast where men sleep and wake 
with all truth gone out of them. Haven’t I seen it 
the world over and didn’t I set my heart on ye and 
ye straining yeer ears to the cries of ’em, like the 
Greeks sailing between the islands and they with the 
wax in their ears the way they’d hear no voices of 
women bringing them to destruction. Cry the good- 
bye to her and ye standing up there on the tilt of 
the mountains and let yeer voice go out with the 
wind that blows over the valley in the ways of her. 
But let ye go down and may the God Almighty be 
at the right hand of ye for ’tis not a woman will take 
that word from the lips of a man her eyes are set on. 
Let you go down and all the nights after will be full 
of the voice of her, for ’tis women have the ways of 
Hell when a man shall set his soul against ’em.” 

“Still — I shall go,” Anthony Sorel replied in the 
quiet confidence of his voice. 

And there they sat talking between the silences 
until the night was worn by their words into the day. 


CHAPTER XI 


S HE had spoken, as they parted that night, of 
some hope that one day he would come down 
from his mountains and visit her in her val- 
ley. And now one morning, when a week had 
gone by, as she was tending to her garden, training 
the tendrils of her seedlings of sweet-peas in the 
way they should go, she looked up at the sound 
of footsteps and saw Anthony Sorel coming to- 
wards her between the long green lines of thick-set 
box. 

He might have seen her glance at the rough gar- 
dening apron that she wore, the swift look at her 
hands which in a garden were clean enough, the 
quick motion putting back the loose hair that had 
fallen over her forehead as she stooped; countless 
other little things he might have observed as he 
came down the garden path but his eyes were not 
for these. They were for her eyes and the thoughts 
that lay behind them. 

Another woman might have excused herself, have 
complained of the untidy apron, mourned over her 
hands, holding them with the mold upon them that 
he might have known their beauty notwithstanding. 
Indeed to any other man, Anna Quartermaine might 
have done this herself. To Anthony Sorel she stood, 
merely expressing her surprise, conscious again of 
209 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


that deeper pulse in her heart which beat but did not 
flutter in its emotion. 

“I have been wondering should I see you again,” 
she said, and in that reserve expressed all the 
thoughts that had persistently occupied her mind 
from the moment of their parting. 

“I didn’t wonder,” said he — “I meant to see you 
again — ” and thereby, without reserve, in such a 
way as a child might tell the simple truth, showed 
her without his knowing it, his thoughts had been 
of her. 

Knowing him so little and in an eagerness for his 
gift of admiration, she asked him why — why had 
he meant to see her again. 

“Because,” he said — “because I had not properly 
said good-bye. There are no such things as man- 
ners between a man and himself. You live here 
and expect them. Didn’t I turn on my heel and 
walk away across the moors, leaving you the rest of 
your way home alone and at night? It didn’t oc- 
cur to me till two days had gone by that I should 
have seen you to your house, that you would natur- 
ally expect it, not that it wasn’t safe but — but — ” 
he smiled — “Oh — just manners. I don’t meet with 
people like yourself and so I have no need of them.” 

This was why he had meant to see her — to say 
good-bye. Had she thought it was that, she might 
not have asked him. There was but little effort in 
her to hide her disappointment. She stood there in 
silence, pulling on her garden gloves as though that 
interest of her flowers at least was left her. She 


210 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


stooped and picked up from the path the box filled 
with the supports for her seedlings. Then she 
looked at him. 

“See my garden first,” said she and wondered to 
herself why she so quietly accepted parting at his 
hands, when in such a mood, she would under some 
pretext have refused it at another’s. 

With his eyes he consented. Indeed it was with 
his eyes he spoke more often than with his lips. She 
knew him best and thought of him most for the si- 
lence of his voice. 

The Darwin tulips were in bud, some burst in 
flower. The great clusters of their formal green 
buds were full of simple conception like the decora- 
tion that a child might make with patient fingers for 
its task, capable only of artless repetition. 

He knew nothing of the names and ways of flow- 
ers. They were only colors out of the earth to him, 
jewels, as when a woman opens her treasure store 
and spreads out her gems wondering and debating 
which she will wear. And there were colors in gen- 
erous plenty for him in her garden. 

The scent of late violets, lingering on, was soft in 
the air. Wallflowers were still just in bloom. It 
was that moment of a garden in Spring when Na- 
ture gives with both hands before the arms of Sum- 
mer are full of roses. He could have chosen no 
better time for apology for his manners. 

She stole sharp glances at his face as they walked 
in silence and knew, as in moments when he stood 
still, like some creature drinking water on a parch- 
2 1 1 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


ing day of thirst, that, despite himself, emotions 
were moving in him and so secretly that he had no 
thought of their control. 

Down one path they wandered and up another. 
Here there were windflowers turning to the sun; 
there the aubretia was mingling purple and mauve 
with the forget-me-not and its blue. With the aid 
of her gardeners, she had not spent those years 
upon her garden in vain. In one of those glances 
as she looked at him, she felt she knew the pur- 
pose it had been. 

Yet she waited for him to speak, leaving him all 
the warmth of emotion that filled his long silence. 
Here she stopped to pick a faded blossom from its 
stalk, there she pulled a weed as though each bed 
of flowers was a bed where children slept, needing 
tenderness. Once she plucked a violet and fastened 
it in the bosom of her dress. And still he was silent, 
with his eyes drinking the colors in and the sun 
heating the air until it seemed as if they scarcely 
walked on earth at all. 

Then in the midst of a path between a wilder- 
ness of roses laden with their little swelling buds, 
he stopped again. At last he spoke. 

“Why did you want me to see your garden first?” 
he asked. 

With him she was deprived of all consciousness 
in her motives and could not answer why. Unless 
it was that she loved her flowers with the proud love 
gardeners have, usurping almost the agency of God, 
talking of their roses as if the earth had never fed 
212 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


them. Unless it were that, she told him. She knew 
no other cause. 

“Don’t you love my garden?” she added. 

He stretched out his arms as though he had been 
asleep, when dreams of impossible things had dis- 
turbed the even measure of his mind. She felt that 
he was urging himself to awake to his old deter- 
minations. 

“It’s full of emotions,” he said. “Colors always 
are. 

She looked at him curiously. 

“Why do you despise emotions so?” she inquired. 

He made a gesture as though he were shaking 
himself free of sensations that oppressed him. He 
turned his head and looked straight into the light 
of the sun until there must have been a dazzling 
blindness in his eyes. 

“I don’t despise them,” he replied — “they despise 
me — have despised me — all my life.” He looked 
at her suddenly, his sight all blinded by the glare of 
sun so that she knew he could scarcely see her face. 
“Don’t you understand why I live as I do?” he 
asked and with more emotion in his voice than she 
had yet heard. “When I told you to think over to 
yourself whether I were queer or not, didn’t you 
come at some idea of meaning about me?” 

“No.” 

She spoke under her breath. Her voice was as 
still as the air the violets were softening with their 
scent. 

“Didn’t I tell you the other day up in the moun- 
213 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


tains that I was trying to find calmness and strength 
for my mind? Didn’t you understand what I 
meant?” 

“I thought I did,” said she — “then, I thought 
I did. Now, I don’t understand at all.” 

“Well, then,” he said suddenly — “I’m thirty- 
three — half of my life gone, nearly all my youth. 
One learns about oneself by the mere actions of one’s 
life, without the need for self-analysis. I’ve learnt 
about myself. First emotion deceives and then de- 
spises me. That is what I have learnt. Now I’m 
learning, up in those mountains alone, how I can 
invigorate my mind without the sensations that emo- 
tion sets at havoc and keeps in endless tumult. Life 
need not be made up of sensations, I used to think 
it was nothing else. Everybody does — more or less, 
according to the strength of their emotions. Not 
once, but many times, I’ve thought I knew what love 
was. Emotion has deceived and then despised me. 
If that is myself then I must rise above myself; for 
what it is in me I don’t know, but something con- 
vinces me that love and all the great emotions in 
life are not of the body, but only of the mind; are 
not sensations, beating you like a storm at sea, 
but visions, such as the prophets saw before the 
world was fettered with its civilization. They are 
the miracles of life which modern culture has re- 
duced to mere sensations. What in days gone by 
they saw in their minds, we see in our eyes; what 
they felt in their souls, we feel in our bodies. When 
they fought with the sword, rightly or wrongly, they 
214 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


fought for ideas. But now when we fight, rightly 
or wrongly, we fight for the welfare of our bodies. 
Can’t you understand? I want to see the miracu- 
lous in life; I want my emotions to become visions 
of the highest things in this world or the next, not the 
sensations that cast me into despair or fling me high 
upon a giddy pinnacle of hope. Oh — I can’t explain 
it any better than that. It is not meant to be ex- 
plained. If there is anything that is God in a man, 
that is what I want to be, not just the ready instru- 
ment in the hands of Nature. I don’t know why 
I go on trying to explain it to you. I have kept si- 
lence these last two years and not even tried to ex- 
plain it to myself. I know what I mean — that has 
been sufficient for me till now. Now I find myself 
floundering in a bewildering morass of words, en- 
deavoring to explain to you what cannot be explained 
with words, what indeed words can only serve to 
conceal.” 

He might not know why he tried to explain it all 
to her, but instinct as swift as it was sure gave 
her sight of it. She stood there looking at his face 
in the sunlight, the half-timid sensitiveness of it and 
yet, above all that, the nervous strength of endur- 
ing purpose, and then her mind fastened itself on 
one of those prophetic determinations women so 
often came upon. She would not lose him, she de- 
clared to herself. Whether it were emotion or the 
laws of Nature, or any of those factors he was en- 
deavoring to master in himself, for herself she rec- 
ognized that essence of inevitability which admits 
215 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


no argument but moves to its purpose as irrevocably 
as the clouds across the sky. Once with the knowl- 
edge of that determination, she set out to show him 
how inevitable it was by those methods of conceal- 
ment with which only a woman knows how to di- 
vulge the secret she would wish made known. 

“Your words don’t confuse it to me,” she said 
gently. “I know what you mean now. But I don’t 
know why you should say your youth is almost gone. 
Aren’t those wonderful ideas the privilege and very 
spirit of youth? Now I understand why you believe 
in faeries. Aren’t they some of your miracles in 
life?” 

“Very earthly ones,” he replied — “those faeries 
in the mountains. I know of no faerie that is a sym- 
bol of great and uplifting ideals. Wherever there 
are faeries, you will only find them to be symbols 
of the emotions known to those people by whom they 
are seen. All the same it is only a consciousness 
of the inner life which makes them visible. That is 
why you find them in Ireland, but even then, only in 
those lonely places where civilization has not passed 
its hands across the eyes of the mind still eager to 
see. There is a saying which has been converted to 
the use of many — you must have heard it. We only 
get those Jews that we deserve. I’ve heard it put 
to that use in England. Here in the mountains we 
might well say — a man only sees the faeries he de- 
serves.” 

“Have you ever seen a faerie?” she asked. 

“I’ve seen lights across the hills,” he replied. 
216 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“Often I saw lights from the window of that little 
cabin of mine — often I heard sounds and once in the 
darkness a voice spoke to me. That was when I 
first came to Knockshunahallion. Now I have no 
light of fear to see, no voice of desires to hear. 
If ever a faerie comes to me, I shall know that I am 
failing in the strength and calmness of my mind.” 

Much as a knowledge of him was coming to her, 
she could not contain the wonder in her eyes. 

“I’m sure you’re the strangest man I’ve ever met,” 
she said. “I can quite understand now, how you 
believe that was faerie music in Mary Coyne’s ears. 
Almost I can believe it myself. Is she any better? 
Is she going to have the operation done? I suppose 
she will when she really comes to realize how seri- 
ous it is.” 

He smiled as he told her there was no belief in 
her as yet. 

“Don’t you remember,” he said, “how I told you 
that Mary Coyne would die that night?” 

“Yes — you said so.” 

“Well— she died.” 

All her understanding of him in that moment 
seemed to leave her. She stood there on the path 
beside him, understanding and but dimly only her- 
self. 

“How did you know she would?” she asked. 

“She meant to die,” he answered. “Of course 
they say the faeries have taken her, and of course 
they have. She has been taken by the faerie she de- 
served. Her beauty killed her.” 

217 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


Now without doubt he had passed her understand- 
ing. What did he mean? What was it he believed? 
The night in Mrs. Coyne’s cottage came rudely back 
to her. Of a sudden she remembered all the things 
that the old woman had said before her frenzy was 
spent. She remembered how he had let her speak, 
saying she had authority. At the time, she had be- 
lieved he said it merely to humor the old woman’s 
madness; but now, superstition, which is the begin- 
ning of faith, was troubling her mind with the 
thought that there was truth in her prophecy. 

“Do you mean to say — ” she asked — “do you 
mean to say you believe in what that old woman 
said that night? That you would be taken by the 
faeries and that I should come by death in my 
dreams?” 

The very words as she said them fell on her ears 
with all the sound of their improbability, yet it was 
the apprehensive fear in her which comes with su- 
perstition that brought them without hesitation to 
her lips. 

“Do you believe?” she said again because she saw 
in him the moment’s hesitation to reply. 

“What is the good of my saying?” he asked. 
“Visions mean nothing to you. Here’s your life — 
here in this garden. We don’t even look at those 
flowers alike. You know all about the nature of 
them, their names, the soil they love, the soil they 
starve in. It’s in their material sense they have 
meaning to you. I don’t say that in contempt. Good 
heavens ! their material meaning is beautiful enough. 
218 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


But it’s not the beauty I want to see.” He held out 
his hand as though he were thrusting it into the flame 
for ever to be burnt. “Please let me go,” he said. 
“I’ve been building a Tower of Babel when I talked 
the other day with you up in my cabin; I’ve been 
building it ever since, been building it this morn- 
ing while I talked to you again. Now it has come 
about my ears. We talk in different tongues. Don’t 
you see that? Beside you I’m abnormal, odd, queer. 
I am queer; but no less than you are to me. But 
yours is the great stream where almost all swim- 
mers seek the current. I’m floundering in a far sea 
where the tides are treacherous and from which no 
swimmer has ever returned to make his chart of the 
way. Please let me go. Good-bye.” 

She would not take his hand. However incom- 
prehensible he was, she yet had made her determi- 
nation. She would not lose him so. 

“Tell me,” she insisted. “I must know. Did you 
believe what that old woman said?” 

“I believe she saw what she said,” he replied — 
“But no man’s Fate is irrevocable. So I may be 
steering, but the rudder is in my hands and I know 
the rocks that threaten. Don’t you realize that that 
is why I am going now?” 

“I shan’t say good-bye,” she replied. 

He dropped the hand to his side. 

“Then I must go without,” he replied and turned 
on his heel down the path between the thick-set box. 

She tried to call him back, but it was not only her 
unfamiliarity with his name that stifled the words 
15 219 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


on her lips. She could not speak. He had destroyed 
the power of it on her tongue. Even when he had 
turned out of sight beyond a bed of flaming tulips, 
she still stood there in silence where he had left her. 


CHAPTER XII 


T HAT evening Anna Quartermaine sent one of 
her brief invitations to Father Nolan. The 
day of sunshine it had been, had turned 
to showers of heavy rain. He came notwithstand- 
ing. Rain was not the excuse she would permit him. 
His old umbrella stood in a pool in a corner of the 
hall to prove what he had come through. He looked 
at the pool; wistfully at the muddy bottoms of his 
trousers and then he was shown into her little bou- 
doir where, against all precedent, she was ready to 
receive him. 

This was a new mood, a strange mood. He took 
her hand warmly — that warmth always allowed him 
— and held it there, looking inquiringly into her eyes. 
She let him look and tried her best to smile. But 
she never meant it to be a success. She meant him 
to see the effort and fully intended he should see it 
fail. 

The whole matter was that she wanted sympathy 
and needed it to be given without the trouble of ask- 
ing. The failure of her smile, that was the utmost 
expression of her request. 

He patted her hand in the fatherly way he had 
with him and asked her what the matter was. 

“Come and eat your dinner,” said she, for it was 
not to be told so readily as all that. There being 
221 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


some matter on her mind, she required at least that 
it should be humored out of her. The joy of telling 
was not to be found in point-blank confession. In- 
deed she ordered her life so that even her depres- 
sions afforded her some enjoyment. The contempla- 
tion of his doing his utmost all through the meal 
to find out what was distressing her, distressing him- 
self in the effort, perhaps spoiling his dinner — which, 
though she did not wish it exactly, yet could not be 
helped — this was the enjoyment she sought for in 
her mood. 

It may be supposed she found it with the charm 
of the ways she had. There never was a more 
sympathetic nature than that of Father Nolan; and 
when it was a woman in distress and that woman 
was Anna Quartermaine, he could take almost the 
color of her mood, turning himself to that exact pitch 
of receptivity when confession becomes the natural 
instinct of the mind. 

His dinner was spoiled. That had to be. She 
could not properly have enjoyed her mood unless. 
It was essential to the whole condition of things that 
she should see him fretting over her. All those who 
had any affection for her were willing enough to do 
that. Father Nolan was one of them and if he 
needed any consolation for the spoiling of his meal, 
found it cheerfully enough in the fact that it was 
Friday — a proper day for such a sacrifice. 

Not until they were back again in her little room, 
taking their coffee out of Lowestoft cups — china, the 
character of which had many resemblances to her — 
222 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


not until then, did she begin to yield to the gentle 
pressure of his questions. 

She was unhappy, she said, because she had heard 
from her celibate — this was the comprehensive way 
she named him to Father Nolan — that she was not 
going to see him again. 

“He writes good-bye,” said she, “and that’s a 
word that depresses me more than anything else. 
Why are men so frightfully, frightfully stupid? I 
hate losing people. Don’t you know that about me? 
I hate it.” 

“You’re going to lose him then?” 

“Indeed I’m not,” said she and, had it been the 
moment to laugh at her, he would have laughed at 
her then. But it was no such moment. His face was 
a picture of solemnity as he returned her look of set- 
tled determination. 

“What brought about the writing of this letter?” 
he asked presently. “Why suddenly does it come 
over him, the way he must say good-bye after all 
this time?” 

“He doesn’t explain,” she replied. “He gives me 
no reasons — just says good-bye. As if things could 
end like that. Aren’t men fools!” 

“Why fools?” said he. 

“Well — because it was so wonderful as it was. 
He was so absolutely different from anyone 
else.” 

“Is it the way you don’t like him now at all?” 

“No — can’t you see — I’m in love with him now. 
That’s what’s making me so miserable. Oh, aren’t 
223 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


men fools! As if any woman would say good-bye . 
to them, once — once ” 

Her eyes, the expression of her lips, the way she 
clutched one hand upon another, all finished that 
sentence for her. He knew what she meant and 
now could afford to relax that solemnity he had as- 
sumed. It was not exactly a moment for laughter, 
but he knew she would expect him to be amused. 

“Oh yes — you can smile,” she said at once, “and 
so can I — but it’s not a smile. It’s only a grin.” 

Suddenly then her whole manner changed. She 
had let him win her out of her mood and at no 
greater cost than the enjoyment of his dinner. Many 
a man had had to pay more than that for the privi- 
lege. She even had let him make her smile. But 
now the mood was gone and, half with the suspicion 
of tears in her eyes, she was showing him her real 
self. 

Leaning forward in her chair, she laid a hand on 
his and tightened her fingers about it, hoping to see 
him wince because the pride of her hands was that 
they were strong. He did wince; just a twitch of 
his eyelids. It was enough for her to see. She felt 
no disappointment to hinder her emotions. 

“Do you think I shall lose him?” she whispered. 
“You’re a man — you’re a celibate — you know what 
men feel when they get these ridiculous notions into 
their heads.” 

Never did she stop to think how her words re- 
flected upon him. These ridiculous notions! He 
could smile at her then, knowing how little she un- 
224 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


derstood, yet realizing how deep an impression those 
very ridiculous notions had made upon her. 

“What does he gain out of life?” she went on, 
still too emotional to choose her words. So inti- 
mately as this she might have spoken to another 
woman, but that women meant little or nothing to 
her. Father Nolan had long discovered that being 
spiritual adviser to Anna Quartermaine entailed ca- 
pacities which demanded the utmost resources of his 
nature. He was a celibate priest and there he was 
expected to sit quietly beside her, telling her what 
were the feelings of a man who got these ridiculous 
notions of celibacy into his head. Without a vivid 
sense of humor he might well have stopped at that. 
But her judgment of him took that quality for 
granted. He must give a satisfactory account of his 
own attitude of mind. Nothing short of that would 
content her. 

“Well — what does he gain?” she persisted, for 
with every intention in the world to reply as best 
he could, he was yet slow of answering. “It seems 
meaningless to me. Life is life. We’ve been given 
our emotions; why should we be ashamed of them? 
Why should we suppose that they do nothing but de- 
ceive us?” 

“Is that what he supposes?” 

“That’s what he says. Have you ever felt that? 
Have you ever felt that your emotions destroyed 
your own power of yourself?” 

“I’m a priest,” said he in self-defense, half hop- 
ing that the reminder might give her pause to think. 

225 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


She took no notice of it. Thoughts were too swift 
in her for arrest such as that. 

“I know — I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m 
asking you. You’ve had your vows taken all these 
years.” 

“Yirra, we won’t say how many,” said he. 

“Well — did you become a priest because you were 
afraid of your emotions?” 

“I did not,” said he. “I became a priest because 
me father put a stick across me back when I said I 
didn’t want to go to Maynooth — and I’ve remained 
a priest — ” his voice altered — “because ’tis the way 
a priest can have a clearer mind for understanding 
the ways of God than him that is being swept this 
way and that with the desires that do be in him.” 

“You mean that?” she asked. He heard the note 
of trouble in her voice. 

“I do,” said he. 

“That’s what he said.” She took her hands from 
his hands and leant back again in her chair. “That’s 
what he said — that there was something of God in 
a man and he was living to find it in himself.” 

“You’d better tell him,” said Father Nolan, 
“that the priesthood is open to him. Wouldn’t he 
be wasting his time in this world with ideas like 
that?” 

“He’s not a priest,” said she. “He’d never be a 
priest. Some of the things he says would make the 
hairs of orthodoxy stand up on your dear old re- 
ligious head.” 

“That doesn’t make him any the less of a priest,” 
226 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


he replied, “no more than falling in love with him 
the moment he’s gone from ye makes ye any the less 
of a woman.” 

She was not prepared to see the twinkle in his eye 
just then and asked him simply if he did really 
think that was so unlike a woman. Receiving no 
answer, she looked up quickly and then she knew. 

“Oh no — don’t make fun of me,” she begged. “I 
am unhappy — I’m really terribly unhappy. I say I 
won’t let him go. But you don’t know that look in 
his eyes as I do. What shall I do if I never see 
him again? What shall I do?” She was not ask- 
ing for an answer to that; did not wait for it. From 
one attitude, from one aspect to another, her mind 
was racing and, leaping back now to what he had 
just said, she asked him what he meant by his allu- 
sions to the priesthood. 

“Why isn’t he any the less of a priest?” she 
wanted to know. 

“Because what I can gather of the young man,” 
said he. “Is he a young man?” 

“About thirty-five.” 

He thought of his own twenty years added to that 
and declared it was a fine age for a man to have 
such knowledge of himself. 

“But from what I can gather of him,” he went on, 
“he’s the type priests are made of. Mind ye, 
they are not all priests that take the collar. They 
are not. And there’s many a man in a hateful red 
tunic or a jaunty Caroline would be better dressed in 
a stole and cassock. Shure ’tis the Church gives 
227 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


a man the collar that he wears, but isn’t it God Al- 
mighty that makes the man what he is? It is in- 
deed. That young man is a priest not because his 
father has never laid a sthick across his back, but be- 
cause God put the spirit of it in his heart. One 
like himself will never be desthroyed by a woman, 
or if he is, ’twill break the heart in him.” 

“Yes — that’s all very well,” said she, in arms at 
once against the attitude he took, “but how about 
me? Don’t I count at all? Am I to be absolutely 
put aside?” 

“And who’s putting you aside?” he returned. 
“Did Major Allen put ye aside? Did all the other 
men who’ve ever been in love with ye — and God 
knows how many fingers I have on my hands and 
what good they’d be to me — did they put ye aside? 
Glory be to God, me dear child, it is not love ye’re 
after wanting.” 

“What is it then?” 

“ ’Tis that thing whatever it may be that ye can’t 
get. And that’s the truth I’m telling ye. Faith, 
ye’re one of those women whose spirits are too high 
for the body God has given ye — beautiful though it 
is.” 

She touched his hand. It was just thanking him 
for that, even though he never noticed it. 

“I suppose there’s a call for ye,” he went on, 
“though the Almighty God knows what it is. I 
wouldn’t hazard a guess meself, unless it was that 
ye’re sent into the world to make life difficult for the 
men who are meant to rise by reason of the difficul- 
228 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


ties they encounter. Unless ’tis that, I can’t see the 
good of ye at all.” 

She looked up at him with puckered lips. 

“You don’t think very much of me then?” she 
said — as she could say it, not too childishly, but with 
big eyes, genuinely wistful. 

“If ye look like that at the young man,” said he, 
“he’ll need all the priest that’s in him by Nature. 
Maynooth ’ud never save him if ye look at him like 
that.” 

She more than touched his hand. Now she took 
it in hers again. 

“Well — say then,” she said eagerly, “say that 
you don’t believe what you said about him before?” 

“What was that?” 

“That he idealized me — but that he might go 
away and marry someone else.” 

“Wouldn’t it be happier for him?” said he. 

“Oh — I don’t know whether it ’ud be happier — 
perhaps it would. But say he won’t.” 

“Well — now — I wouldn’t say that at all.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because he might. But ye can be satisfied in 
yourself that it wouldn’t be anyone ye’d be jealous 
of. That sort of man when he does marry, needs 
a creature that doesn’t begin to know the sort of 
husband she’s got and is no more a part of his real 
life than the coat he lays on his back.” 

“Do you mean a sort of peasant woman?” She 
thought of Mary Coyne with her undeveloped mind 
and the wonderful beauty of her face. Did he mean 
229 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


such a woman as that? She thought of Anthony 
Sorel at the cross roads where often he had told her, 
he stood and watched the girls and young men danc- 
ing. Did he mean a woman as one of those? A 
dread swept into her heart that it might be true 
when — “Oh — what a shame that would be!” she 
cried. “Surely a man like that couldn’t be wasted 
in such a way.” 

“I don’t know would it be a waste?” said Father 
Nolan slowly. “With such a woman as that, ye 
might scarcely say he was married at all. She’d 
never stand in the pathway he’s walking in. I dunno 
would it be a waste. It might be the only thing for 
him. Then he’d keep ye in his mind — the ideal un- 
touched — for the remainder of his life and maybe 
he’d be telling the good girl he was married to all 
about ye.” 

“Tell her how much he loved me and she’d listen, 
never saying a word.” This she joined in with, 
seeing the picture far clearer than he. “But, Oh my 
goodness!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you call that a 
waste ! What’s the matter with me ?” She im- 

pelled him now to look at her. “What harm should 
I bring to him? You talk about me as if I were a 
thing to be avoided. Am I as horrible as all 
that?” 

He shook his head backwards and forwards as 
one who gave up all hope of understanding. Even 
here, he could see the net she was spreading to catch 
him. Was she as horrible as all that? What a 
question! Yet he set out boldly to answer it. 

230 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“Ye have the laws of Nature in the bones of ye,” 
said he, “and a man of his kind would be doing 
well for himself if he went to the other ends of the 
earth than be meeting ye. Don’t ye know that your- 
self? Isn’t this young fella after saying there is 
something of God in a man and shure it isn’t that in 
him would be any good to Nature at all. ’Tis not 
marriage he’s wanting, which is an earthly sacra- 
ment death can put an end to; ’tis something which 
denies death, something which the life ye’d bring 
him would only destroy with the fear of death. 
Surely to God the less ye lay hold on life in this 
world, the easier it is to let it go in the hour of 
severance. But the laws of Nature are quick in 
yeer veins, the way ye’d have him bind up his life 
with your own and the children he’d bring ye, so 
that the fear of death would come quick to him 
at night while ye lay suffering on a bpd of child- 
birth. That young man’s a priest, I tell ye, and 
whether he wears the collar or not he’ll strive as 
much as any man of the Church to keep the distance 
of ye.” 

He had spoken now in the fearlessness of what he 
believed, feeling, despite his friendship for her, 
all his sympathies given out to this young man; 
knowing the difficulties of the way he had chosen 
and believing how nothing but the sanctuary of the 
Church could save him when once she had set her 
heart upon his capture. 

He rose to his feet now and looked wistfully again 
at the muddy bottoms of his trousers. 

231 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“Tell him from me,” said he, “that only the 
Church’ll save him. That young man ought to be 
a monk in Melleray and never speak to a woman 
again, if ’tis the way he would keep to the path he’s 
walking in. The world is no place for him. ’Tis 
there he can keep ye the ideal woman in his 
mind and be silent for the rest of his life. Tell 
him that from me,” he added and turned then to 

go- 

“You’re only thinking for him — you don’t think 
for me at all,” said she. 

“Faith, I’ve never met anybody could do their 
own thinking better than ye can yeerself,” he replied. 

“Aren’t ye thinking now as hard as yeer brain’ll let 
ye, the way ye can bring him back to ye? Isn’t that 
what ye’re thinking?” 

“He shan’t go and throw himself away on a peas- 
ant woman,” she declared. “I’ll save him from 
that.” 

“I’d trust ye for that,” said he. “That young 
fella has chosen a path no woman has ever let a man 
walk in yet. I shall be marrying the two of ye one 
day and I’ve no doubt he’ll have the sense to bless 
me for it for the rest of his life. But he won’t be 
the man he was and he knows it now.” 

He went to the door and opened it, then turned 
again. 

“Yeer gardener — Michael — told me ye had a 
young man seeing round the garden to-day. Is it the 
way ye’re going to take another man’s advice about 
yeer own garden?” 


232 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“I might,” said she. 

“Michael will never forgive ye if ye do,” said he. 
“Oh yes, he will,” she replied — “Why, everybody 
forgives me — even you.” 


CHAPTER XIII 


A NTHONY SOREL came back to his cabin in 
the mountains as a man returns from his 
pilgrimage to a holy shrine. 

A new vigor was in him, a higher exaltation than 
he had ever reached. The very earth he trod was 
buoyant underneath his feet. With every lark that 
rose out of the heather, his heart went with it up into 
the burnished sky. 

There was victory in sight of him. In those two 
years of solitude, he now believed he had found the 
mastery of emotion. He could look at the thing he 
loved without desire of that bodily sensation of pos- 
session. He could put her out of the immediate de- 
mands of his life as, coming to the hour of his la- 
bor, a man might put down a child from his knees. 
Another lonely year perhaps with that ideal before 
his eyes and he might have knowledge of his soul 
to claim the thing he loved without fear that his 
emotions would deceive him. 

Yet so swift had it been, that there still were mo- 
ments when he sat alone, in which he doubted of 
himself. Her beauty, not in each separate feature, 
but that beauty he saw in all her face, meaning the 
beauty to him he found within her mind, came back 
again and again to him in his meditations. 

Then one night he dreamt he stood beside the lake 
234 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


that lies in that depthless hollow of Knockshunahal- 
lion and, as he watched the water, black as the ash- 
tree buds, there rose out of the deep fathoms, bub- 
bles, that quivered to the surface and became her eyes. 
Then, as they looked at him, her whole face rose out 
of the water’s edge and last of all, her body gleam- 
ing wet. With beckoning finger she called him to 
her. He stepped down into the water to her side. 

It was not cold, the water, as it closed around 
him, but warm and heavy like a viscous stream. The 
warmth of it rose to his brain, stifling the will in him 
to yet turn back. But still her finger beckoned him 
and still with the heavy water like chains about his 
limbs, he struggled on to reach her side. Then, 
when he was so near he could stretch out his hand 
and touch her, she lay her arms about his neck and 
slowly caught him down below the surface of the 
lake; down, down, and down into the deep dark- 
ness where the water was chill as melted snow. 
There, winding his own arms about her, he clung 
to her for the warmth her body gave. And still 
they sank, until the light of sky was blotted out 
above their heads and darkness came as a thing that 
falls with a loud voice, deafening in the ears. 

He awoke, his body trembling as he lay upon his 
bed. It was only a dream, he said, but until the 
dawn broke out across the hills, he could not shake 
off the warm touch of her arms from round his 
neck. 

So came the doubt of himself out of the essence of 
that dream and all these things he told to Malachi 
16 235 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

one night as they sat together over the smoking fire 
of peat. 

Malachi sat knotting his fingers and at intervals 
spitting into the fire as he listened. When he had 
made an end, telling him this and that, how he had 
said good-bye to Anna Quartermaine in the garden 
at Ballysaggartmore, the dream he had dreamt and 
all its lingering insistence in his mind, Malachi took 
the old iron rod that served him to poke the fire and 
stirred the smoldering peat. The crackling sparks 
leapt up into the blackness of the chimney and left 
a glow of light on both their faces that seemed to 
linger about them after the flame had gone. 

“Wasn’t it I tellin’ ye,” he said at last — “wasn’t 
it I tellin’ ye the nights would be full of the voice of 
her and ye going to the South to set yeer eyes on 
her once again. ’Tis no woman will take the part- 
ing words from a man wanst the heart has gone 
out of her, an’ she lookin’ east and west in the 
night for the sight of him.” 

Anthony Sorel stretched out his hands to the blaze 
of the fire and shivered, for the night had come 
about them chill in the mountains there with the 
late frosts of May. 

“ ’Tis not she has come back to me,” said he de- 
spondently, “but the call of my own self crying back 
out of the years that are behind me. And if it comes 
to me more, shan’t I open my ears to it, till the sight 
and the touch of her grow to the hunger in me and 
all the great hope that I’ve had in my soul be de- 
stroyed?” 


236 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


He buried his face in his hands when, like a 
father watching over his child, Malachi sat by the 
chimney corner, never taking his eyes from the 
stooping figure sitting there, motionless and de- 
jected. 

“ ’Tis yeerself has as much knowledge of women,” 
he said after a while, “as I’d be having meself of 
the four corners of heaven, or God Almighty Him- 
self in His golden chair. Shure, isn’t there the devil 
in all women and wouldn’t they hold a man the way 
he’d be sthrainin’ and pullin’ like Dorgan’s jennet 
is spanceled and tied to the root of his elder tree?” 

So they sat and so they talked, as men talk of 
women, when the fear of a woman is upon them and 
only courage comes to them as they sit alone. 

“Am I never to know a woman again?” asked 
Anthony Sorel presently. “Is love always to be a 
thing of passionate emotion that makes me slave 
instead of master of myself? Have I lived here in 
the mountains these two years for nothing?” 

Malachi cut another quid of tobacco in the homy 
palm of his hand. The click of the knife as he shut 
it was like the report of a pistol in that lonely si- 
lence. 

“Would ye leave yeer cabin up there?” he asked 
bitterly as he thrust the tobacco in the accustomed 
corner of his mouth. “Would ye leave yeer cabin 
up there and go down to the mad diversions of the 
town land and get lost like John Troy is traipsing 
the big cities of the western world an’ he with the 
songs dead in him could sing like a mating thrush?” 
237 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


He shook his hand above his head with prophetic 
gesture. “I tell ye this,” said he, “that the day ye 
come down from the windy hollows of those hills is 
the day ye come down from the heights yeer soul has 
climbed to and may the Almighty God keep my eyes 
from the light of that day, for there’s no such man 
since I came here living on the starving land could 
catch the music out of the wind or make a song to 
try the heart in me.” 1 

With the swift impulse of youth and the swifter 
impulse of a sudden exaltation of his heart’s de- 
sire, Anthony Sorel stretched out his hand and took 
the horny fingers that felt like knotted wood as he 
held them in his own. 

“I won’t come down from the mountains,” he 
said slowly. “Not until I can stand here before 
God and swear I am the master of myself. When 
that day comes ’tis more than music I shall catch 
out of the mountain winds; ’tis more than trying 
the heart in you my songs will be doing then. Now 
her voice shall cry no longer to me in the still night. 
I’ll put the wax in my ears and bind my limbs to my 
cabin door and you shall see the months go by and 
I coming alone to the spirit of mastery in my soul. 
That’s my oath to you and I ” 

He stopped with a jerk of a sudden in his voice, 
for out of the penetrating silence of the surround- 
ing hills, there came upon his ears the sound of a 

1 This was the only occasion in all his narrative when the old man 
showed me in so many words how deep was his affection and admira- 
tion for Anthony Sorel. E. T. T. 

238 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


woman singing in the night outside. He glanced at 
Malachi, when he knew that to him alone the voice 
was audible. The old man stood there in the dim 
light of the peat fire, no more than expectancy upon 
his face as he waited for Anthony Sorel to make 
an end of what he was saying. 

It was evident, Malachi had not heard, yet the 
voice was drawing nearer and the sound of her sing- 
ing was vibrating like far echoes in his ears. It was 
then, as he listened, there came suddenly to his mind 
the words of Mrs. Coyne she had spoken to himself 
and Anna Quartermaine that night in Gorteeshall. 

“ ’Tis not that sort of wisdom will be sthandin’ 
to ye,” she had said, “an’ ye taken by the faeries 
yeerself where the roads are crossed and the night 
comes batterin’ with the wind across the mountains 
at yeer little door.” 

And not those words only, but the words he had 
said in the garden to Anna Quartermaine herself, 

“A man only sees the faeries he deserves. If ever 
I see a faerie, I shall know that I am failing in the 
strength and calmness of my mind.” 

Then what was this he heard, this voice of a 
woman, that came out of the hills where never a 
woman at that hour would dare to walk alone? 
Mary Coyne had heard the music of the faeries, 
had seen their enchanted fires, had followed them 
until they and death had overtaken her. Was it 
this, at the very moment of its highest confidence, 
that was to come to him? 

He stood by the fire with his hand half lifted, his 
239 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


eyes, his ears, every sense in him brought to the 
service of listening to that voice. 

“Yirra, what’s on ye?” asked Malachi. 

“Can’t you hear?” he replied. 

Malachi turned his head to one side. 

“There are no sounds coming out of this night 
to me,” said he. “What is it ye’re after hearing 
yeerself ?” 

“A woman’s voice, singing — out there on the side 
of the hill. Now it’s nearer — and now nearer. 
Can’t you hear? Listen! She must be coming this 
way.” 

The cry of a curlew flying up from the moors, 
broke the stillness in Malachi’s deaf ears and then 
he too heard the faint notes, now dropping to si- 
lence, now rising again, the voice as of one who 
picked their way on a strange and venturesome path. 

The fear of the unknown that comes to so many 
of us and swiftest of all to those who live in its soli- 
tude amongst the mountains and in the tenantless 
corners of the world, came like a rushing and a chilly 
wind upon Malachi then. He stood in the quiver- 
ing half-lights of the still peat fire and his knees 
shook together and his eyes sought out in fear 
through the little window where the light of the 
moon was a silvered daylight on the sloping hills. 

Anthony Sorel stood there beside him, no trem- 
bling in his limbs, but a chill whiteness about his lips. 
His eyes, too, were set upon that window square 
where the moonshine made the day of night and the 
pupils of his eyes were large and black and his lips 
240 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


were parted and he breathed as they breathe in a 
room of death. 

And nearer and nearer came the singing of that 
voice, rising and falling, dropping to silence as a 
mountain stream that finds a level bed, lifting to 
music as when it tumbles to the tiny cataract. 

Not one word passed between them while they 
waited, waited with that unspoken belief as one 
thought between them, in the sure knowledge she 
must pass that way. 

At last, at the moment when they must see her 
go by, Malachi gripped his hand upon Anthony 
Sorel’s shoulder. 

“ ’Tis Queen Maeve herself,” he whispered — 
“an’ she drawin’ the souls of men would be leaving 
the sides of their fires to be followin’ her.” 

Then, through the window, the figure of a woman 
cut a black outline against the whiteness of the 
moon. For a moment she stopped and looked within. 
Both saw her face thrust close against the pane. 
Her eyes distinguished them in that faint darkness. 
They stood as black as her against the fire. 

“ ’Tis Mary Coyne,” whispered Malachi. “ ’Tis 
Mary Coyne an’ she coming back from the faeries 
to tread her feet once more on the sides of the 
hills.” 

“ ’Tis not Mary Coyne,” Anthony Sorel replied 
below his breath. For in that instant’s sight, he had 
seen the look of Anna Quartermaine in the hooded 
face. Such a peasant girl as Mary Coyne doubtless 
she was; but there was that look of Anna Quarter- 
241 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


maine’s eyes, of Anna Quartermaine’s lips as he had 
seen and felt them in his dream. 

In another moment she had gone and then he 
knew the faerie he deserved had come to him. This 
was the symbol of his besetting emotion and deep 
as it struck the fear into his heart, he yet found his 
feet being drawn from him to the door. 

“Where are ye going, Anthony Sorel?” cried 
Malachi in a trembling voice. 

“Out on the hill,” he replied and there was all the 
sound of dreams in his voice — “out on the hill there 
to bring her back.” 

As swift as his shivering limbs would let him 
move, Malachi ran to lay hands upon him then. 

“For the love of God,” he begged, “leave her 
be! Isn’t there desthruction in the singing of her 
voice, and wouldn’t the eyes of her be takin’ ye out 
of the world? For the love of the Almighty God 
leave her be !” 

But his words fell like drops of water that splash 
upon the stones. Anthony Sorel had flung open the 
door and, as the moonlight rushed in, he had slipped 
out into the night. 


CHAPTER XIV 


T HE moonlight lay wide and white across the 
hills. It cast strange shadows behind the 
stunted thorn trees, the prevailing wind had 
swept out like a woman’s hair. In the distance, 
down the twisting path that wound through the 
clumps of heather, Anthony Sorel could see the fig- 
ure of the peasant woman as she passed away to 
the moors. 

Her head was covered with a shawl, as they wear 
it everywhere in the South; her skirt was short; her 
feet were bare. Now and again she stumbled as she 
walked, but still she was singing and the notes of 
her voice rose up into the height of the hills through 
the clear silver of the air as the song of a lark wings 
upwards into the heavens. 

He stood outside the door of Malachi’s cabin, 
watching her, listening to her song, struggling yet 
within himself to the obedience of Malachi’s im- 
portuning. But back, again and again, came the 
sight of her face, her lips, her eyes, as when she 
had peered through the window. If this was indeed 
a faerie, the symbol of his overwhelming emotion, 
was it strength, was it not fear in the heart of him 
holding him back from the deliberate encounter? 

The very emotion she had stirred in him, inter- 
preted his hesitation thus. But once he had so con- 
243 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


sidered it, he left no time to waiting. With quick 
strides he was after her down the mountain path. 
There was her dark green shawl, the sway of her 
short skirt but half-a-mile before him. When there 
was but scarce that distance left between them, she 
stopped and turned. He could see her face in the 
moonlight, the glint of her white feet against the 
dark ground. 

She was waiting for him to come up with her and 
now, as he drew nearer, fear shortened the length 
of his stride. All the eagerness of pursuit that had 
stirred the blood in his veins was now gone from 
him. There was a chill at his heart and over and 
over again through his mind ran the prophetic words 
of Mrs. Coyne, “ ’Tis not that sort of wisdom will 
be sthandin’ to ye and ye taken by the faeries where 
the roads are crossed.’’ 

Where the roads were crossed ! And there stood 
that dark figure with its pale face and still white 
hands — there it stood at the edge of the cross roads 
that lead down into the valley and stretch across the 
whole length of the mountains’ feet. 

As he came within some twenty yards or so of 
her, he stopped altogether as though consciously 
upon the edge of that enchanted faerie circle encom- 
passing her about. There he stood and through 
the moonlight stared at her, his lips set closely, his 
eyes kindled with the unknown fear that was in 
him. 

For some moments in silence they stood thus, the 
moonlight and the mountains all about them and 
244 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


those white, silvered ribbands of the roads unrolling 
away at either side till they became mere threads 
the distance wound upon a vanishing reel. 

With a conscious effort at last, he forced the 
sound of his voice into the dry hollow of his throat. 
He felt the words awkward and stumbling on his 
tongue and the sound of them in that still air of 
the night was like the voice of one who speaks out 
of dreams far off in sleep. 

“Who are you?” he asked. 

“ ’Tis aiqual to God who I’d be,” said she, “and 
ye followin’ me in the lonesomeness of these hills 
are steeped and drowned in silence, the way I could 
hear ye steppin’ over the heather like thunder cornin’ 
on me.” 

Her voice was as still and gentle as the winds that 
come in May. It might have been Anna Quarter- 
maine herself speaking to him, for even to her voice, 
though in the deep richness of that inland brogue, 
there was the same fatal resemblance he had seen 
as she looked through the window-pane into Mala- 
chi’s little room. 

“What are you doing out here on the mountains, 
now at this hour of the night?” 

He put his questions in all the uncertain note of 
fear. She stood there by a gap in the loose stone 
wall that edged the road and there was laughter in 
her eyes because of his fear as she looked at him. 

“Come close to me now,” said she, “if ye’d need 
to be knowin’ so much about me. Shure what’s 
the fear on ye? Come close to me now and I only 
245 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


a woman is sthandin’ here in this lone corner of 
the hills.” 

“I’ll not come closer / 4 he replied. “Don’t I know 
you’ve come out of the lake up there in Knockshuna- 
hallion? Didn’t I see your eyes and your face com- 
ing up out of the water to me in my dreams these 
two nights gone and didn’t you draw me with your 
body into the water till all the blackness of it was 
closed over us and I in your arms sinking down into 
the depths till the darkness was thunder in my 
ears?” 

“Did I do that?” said she, peering with her eyes 
into his face that was turned from the moon and 
black in the darkness of its own shadow. 

“You did,” he replied, “but I’ve had the warn- 
ing of you that comes now shouting in my ears.” 

“Ye’ve had warnin’ of me? There’s not one in 
these mountains would be knowin’ the sight of me 
this night.” 

“ ’Twas not in knowledge of you,” he replied, 
“but the old woman in Gorteeshall who told the 
faeries would take me and I losing all the wisdom 
I’d got out of the silence of these hills and the 
hunger of my own heart for the truth. But she told 
wrong, for there’s strength in me yet can destroy the 
power of such as you.” 

“What would be the power of a poor girrl the 
likes of me would have over a young fella the likes 
of ye is sthrong and lithesome wid the power of 
men?” 

“ ’Tis no power of men,” said he, “would be 
246 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


holding to me now. Isn’t it the very power in a 
man is weakness in him that time when the passion 
in him comes dropping weak like water in his veins? 
’Tis not because I’m strong and lithesome shall I 
be able to shut my ears and hear no voice of a woman 
calling to me across the hollows of these hills, but 
because there is the truth in me and while there’s 
that, I’ll have no fear of all the faeries in the 
world.” 

She looked at him as he turned with his gaze 
across the sweep of the mountains and the moonlight 
fell on him. She saw the thin light of his lips and 
the glittering light of his eyes and she threw back 
her head, laughing softly for the fear that was in 
him. 

“Isn’t the fear white with ye now?” said she and 
there was the laughter come into her voice to taunt 
him. “Come here to me now if there’s no fright 
on ye and tell me the voice of the woman is calling 
to ye now when the night comes down over the starv- 
ing land. Come here to me now and tell me 
that.” 

“I’ll not stir my feet from where I am,” said he, 
“for you know well the voice of the woman it is. 
Isn’t the light of her eyes in your eyes there and 
aren’t her lips the red of your lips and haven’t you 
stolen the beauty that’s in her face to come here 
tempting me into the mountains?” 

In a sudden change his voice took power and 
command as he came to the mastery of his fear. 

“Take the shawl off your head,” he demanded, 
247 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

“and let me see is your hair the color and softness 
of hers.” 

“How did ye know was her hair so soft?” she 
asked quickly, “an’ ye keeping yeer hands from the 
touch of her and starvin’ yeer eyes in the windy 
gaps of these hills?” 

“Would it need the touch of my hands?” said he. 
“Isn’t it the most fatal beauty of a woman a man 
will find in the secret of his heart where the evil 
that’s in him comes singing the songs of passion in 
his ears? Take off the shawl from your head and 
let me see all the beauty you’ve stolen to bring here 
crying out to me this night.” 

“Come yeerself to me now,” she answered. “Let 
yeer own fingers unknot it, if ye have the mind to 
see.” 

One step he took towards her, no more. She 
stood leaning against the loose stone wall, her head 
thrown back, inviting him to unloose the shawl about 
her head. But the fear had come back upon him 
now. He trembled as he stood and the will in him 
to resist shook him in its conflict with the desire if 
only to touch her with his hands. 

“Would ye have fear of a girrl is lost and wan- 
derin’ on the mountain roads? Yirra, glory be to 
God, wouldn’t it be safe I’d be and no harm cornin’ 
to me at the fall of night if I could walk these ways 
and bring such fear to the men would be meetin’ 
me?” 

He looked above him up the twisting path to 
where the faint light in Malachi’s cottage window 
248 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


pricked its point of orange in the silvered night. 
There he wished he was then and the longing was 
near to him that he had listened to Malachi’s words. 
For now the desire was strong in him to bend her 
in the strength of his arms, when all that he had 
striven for in those years of his solitude would be 
gone from him as water goes from a leaking pot, 
and the ideal he had raised of Anna Quartermaine 
in his mind would be further from him than ever. 

It was the strength of his will he cried for then 
and the more his eyes fed upon the sight of her, the 
more faint it grew within him. For in this it was 
the temptation lay, that she had all the beauty of 
Anna Quartermaine, yet there in that peasant’s 
dress, with short-hung skirt and pale bare feet, gave 
him no moment of that quiet mind he had so firmly 
set his ideal upon. 

Here indeed was the symbol of his besetting emo- 
tion; for now he knew how those two years of soli- 
tude had not completed the transfiguration of his 
soul. There still was the nature in him of the self- 
conscious man, a slave to the passions the world 
had born in him. 

With her mind, or with all that which he believed 
of it, Anna Quartermaine had carried him still higher 
in the ambition of his soul. But now he had fallen 
to this, this sudden and most bitter knowledge of 
himself. He was not fit to love her yet. His dream 
indeed had shaken the deeper confidence in himself. 
But now as he stood there on the side of the hill, 
watching her eyes, her lips, her laughter as she 
249 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


laughed, he knew too well how long the way 
must be before he should reach the mastery of him- 
self. 

With a giant effort of his will in that moment, 
he summoned strength to him and held out his hand 
before him as though to keep distance between them. 
So he steeled the sight of his eyes, willing himself 
to see only with the clearer vision of his soul. 

“If it were fear of you,” he said slowly at last, 
and measured his words to keep the needful bal- 
ance of his mind, “if it were fear of you, should I 
be standing as I am with only the night between 
me and the thing I feared?” 

“What fear is on ye then?” she asked in her 
gentlest voice. “Shure wouldn’t I be putting me 
arms about ye and holding ye like a babe has the 
hand of Death on its little throat?” 

“ Tis fear of myself is on me,” said he, “the 
fear of a man when he comes to the evil that’s in 
him and sees vanishing the power of his soul like a 
ship put out to sea.” Then of a sudden without 
warning, he lifted up his voice and cried out in the 
pain of conflict in his mind. “Get back into the 
night,” he cried aloud. “Take your eyes away from 
me and your lips that smile and the songs that you 
sing. It’s not in one hour I’ll go back to the man 
that I was.” 

“Is it drive me away?” she whispered, “and I a 
woman alone in the night with all the length of the 
roads and the wild hills in the face of me?” 

“It is driving you away,” he replied, “and with 
250 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


the power of God, I shall never set these eyes on 
you again.” 

She turned as though pride had come to her and, 
stepping through the gap of the loose stone wall, 
she climbed down into the road. Then she looked 
up at him once more, standing there black above her. 

“ ’Tis more than ever a man has wished of me 
before,” she said, “and ’twill be a mighty thing the 
power of God will be if yeer eyes never set glance 
on me again. Keep your watch over the hills and 
through the slow hours of the night, for the power 
of God is a mighty thing, Anthony Sorel, but it sets 
no stay on the life a man must take or leave for 
himself.” 

She knew his name ! He heard the sound of it 
strange as it left her lips and came across the still 
air of the night to his ears. 

“Who gave you the name I have?” he cried out 
to her, but only her laughter came back in answer 
to his cry, her laughter when it turned into the song 
in her voice once more as she swung her way down 
the hill road with her bare feet glistening beneath 
her skirt and her head thrown back in a young joy 
of the light of the moon. 

A belt of oak trees flung shadows over the road 
where it turned down to the breadth of the moors 
and into these shadows as into a house he watched 
her figure go and, as a door that shuts out the night, 
they closed about her. 

He still stood with his eyes straining to follow her 
as she went, but saw her no more again that night. 


17 


CHAPTER XV 


A NTHONY SOREL did not return to Mal- 
achi’s cottage that night, but went back to 
his own cabin in the silence and the solitude 
of Knockshunahallion where all the hours until 
morning came he sat contemplating the thing he 
had seen and the meaning it was to him. 

Now it seemed as if the spirits of faerie were 
all about him. An endless music was in his ears 
which now was low and soft as it might be the wind 
when it plays about the hollows and the crevices 
and then was loud and deafening to be heard like 
the noise of thunder rolling across the sky. He sat 
at his window and saw strange lights across the hills 
and there came to the sense of his nostrils soft per- 
fumes like memories he strove with all the conscious- 
ness of his mind to recall but could never bring back 
into the certain presence of his thoughts. 

And all this while till the morning came, he re- 
mained motionless at the little square of his window, 
his eyes turned across the moors below towards 
Ballysaggartmore and sometimes they were closed 
and sometimes they were open as with one who drifts 
between waking and sleep yet is never in the clear 
region of his consciousness. 

At times he would speak beneath his breath and 
again at times cry out with a loud voice as if in 
252 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


pain; and once he cried the name of Anna Quarter- 
maine, at which he trembled in himself as the echoes 
of it beat from wall to wall of his little cabin like 
a caged thing struggling to be free. 

So the night passed and the next day he walked 
about in the upper heights of the mountains, cease- 
lessly moving from one still place to another until 
all the energy in his body was a dead thing to him 
and he returned at evening exhausted to his cabin 
door. 

That night he slept, but the mist of dreams was 
about his eyes and in the ceaseless industry of his 
brain. But now he knew the woman it was, who 
came beckoning to him out of the night of his 
dreams. In his sleep, though there was no power in 
him to resist her, he knew that in the morning with 
his walking, all the power that he had would re- 
turn. 

The next day, this time when it was scarce sun- 
rise, he set out upon his wanderings once more. 
Sleep had brought him no rest but with the daylight 
had come energy and the still burning vigor in his 
soul. Taking bread and milk from a cottage here, 
a cabin there, he went on his way without thought of 
direction until, as the sun had begun its steady pas- 
sage down the sky, he found his feet turning on the 
road to Ballysaggartmore. 

At that realization, all movement in him was 
brought to sudden arrest; for in that moment had 
come back to his mind one of those perfumes that 
had touched his senses like memories which now he 
253 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


could recall. It was the scent of the violets in Anna 
Quartermaine’s garden, of the violets and all the 
flowers which that morning had flung their odor 
into the warm air. 

He stood trembling at the thought that his senses 
and all the conscious instincts of his body had been 
so much alive, even then. Did it mean that never 
had he come within sight of the ambition of his 
soul? Did it mean that all this mastery of his emo- 
tions had been a foolish, empty dream; that all a 
thousand years of solitude would never destroy the 
conscious man in him; that he was the same that 
day as he had ever been, as fcvery man had been 
from the beginning and still would be? 

With a cry of pain which no restraint in him 
could silence or subdue, he swiftly turned upon his 
heel and set his back towards the place where his 
ideal lay, fearing the self in him that could destroy 
the thing he cherished most. 

Now he was coming to Ballyduff, where the road 
turns by a forge and bends up to a mere cart track 
across the wild acreage of moors. This way he went 
nor stopped again until he stood knocking on the 
door of Malachi’s cabin on Crow Hill. 

In the act of making his evening tea, the old man 
heard the falling sound and set down his kettle in 
the embers. A light of gladness was in his eyes as 
he went to the door, for he knew well whose knock- 
ing it must be. 

“God be wid this day,” said he as he opened the 
door and beheld Anthony Sorel standing there and 
254 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


then he saw the light that shone on his face from 
the damp sweat that was on him. 

“In the name of God,” said he, closing the door — 
“In the name of God what’s on ye to be sweating 
like a young stallion is fretting the earth for his 
mare? What’s on ye, in the name of God? Haven’t 
I seen ye beyond over and up in the heights of the 
hills and ye traveling east and west like a man is 
pursued by all the devils of the dark places?” 

He took him by the shoulders and sat him down 
in his own chair and stood over him like a shepherd 
that stands over the sheep he has found destroyed 
and exhausted in the black shadows of the glen. 

“What’s after ye, Anthony Sorel?” he asked pres- 
ently, for in the hands that covered the sweating 
brows and the knees that shook as he leant upon 
them, the old man could see that agony of spirit by 
which he was consumed. “What’s after ye?” he 
repeated. 

“ ’Tis myself is after me,” Anthony Sorel replied. 
“ ’Tis by myself I am pursued. All these days 
since that witch brought the beauty of the woman 
in the valley up to me here in the mountains, have 
I been set upon by the man that is in me and cannot 
bring him down. From sunrise to the fall of the 
night I have walked the untrodden tracks of the 
mountains to kill the thoughts that are in me with 
fatigue. But in sleep I am not alone.” He wrung 
his hands before him as many a man indeed has 
done. “What has come to me?” he cried out. 
“Didn’t I say good-bye to her because I knew I could 
255 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


love her with the soul that was in me! And now 
is this curse of the body I have, to stand between 
me and the thing I love?” 

He buried his face in his hands again and there 
came once more the rush of the music to his ears 
and in the eyes his fingers pressed to blindness, great 
lights were flashing in a sea of burning red. 

Malachi spat the juice of the tobacco from his 
mouth. 

“Why didn’t ye take the words av an old man,” 
said he, “was after telling ye ’tis not in the ways of 
a woman to be parting her life from the man her 
heart is coming to? May the Lord Almighty have 
mercy on ye for the stricken man that ye are. 
Haven’t ye chosen a road is sore to the feet of a 
man, must be walking in the light of the day and 
the drift of the night and won’t the soul be 
desthroyed in ye to leave it? Is it the way ye’re 
going maybe to leave the quiet places of these hills 
and the wisdom that is come to ye? Is that the way 
wid ye, Anthony Sorel? Are the soft breasts of her 
softer than the moss to yeer head when ye’d be 
sleepin’ alone on the hills at night, with the great 
darkness of the starry skies like the weight of dew, 
so gentle it would be on the lids of yeer eyes? Are 
the lips of her sweeter than the lips of a sthone, 
would be dropping sweet water from a mountain 
stream? Are the eyes of her brighter than the stars 
of God are lighting like candles about his golden 
chair?” 

The note of his voice had fallen to a tone of in- 
256 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


finite sorrow as he spoke. In all the strange jour- 
neys he had made, he had seen the souls of men so 
beaten by the storm, so driven before the winds of 
passion as Anthony Sorel was driven then. And 
he knew how man is a man and God is a spirit, yet 
never had he known the spirit in a man so strong 
as he had seen it in Anthony Sorel. But now he 
could tell the end as surely as he had told it in 
others. 

“Is it caught she has ye?” he went on in the same 
mournful note of his voice. “Is it caught she has 
ye in the long delay of her arms? Speak the truth 
to me now the way ye’d be speaking to the Lord 
God has ears from the far corners of His lonesome 
Heaven. Is this the last these old eyes will be seeing 
of ye on the hungry slopes of these hills?” 

Anthony Sorel came to his feet that still were 
weak beneath him as he stood, and his head was 
thrown back and the fire of God was akindle once 
more in his eyes. 

“ ’Tis the last ye’ll see of me, Malachi,” he said, 
“but ’tis not to be drowned in her kisses I’m gone. 
There are further parts of the earth than this, where 
the winds of God would never find the ears of a 
man to be fighting his soul. I’ll go out far into the 
barren West where never a goat could find its food. 
’Tis then when the nights drop still with the summer 
moon, you’ll hear the songs I’d be singing as I come 
past the man that is in me to the very feet of God 
Himself. I’ll go far from here and in two days 
these mountains will lose sight of me and ’tis not a 
257 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


woman nor the man that is in me shall destroy the 
ideal she’s set up in my mind.” 

He took Malachi’s shoulders in his trembling 
hands and, as he looked in his eyes, there was a drop 
of sweat that rolled off his shining forehead and 
split itself upon the floor. And Malachi told him 
of a charm that would keep the evil faeries off of 
him and then he went out of the house and came to 
his own cabin by Knockshunahallion. 


CHAPTER XVI 


A LL the next day, Anthony Sorel made prepara- 
tion for his going, but there were not many 
things that he would take with him, having 
no worldly goods but the crucifix that he had nailed 
to the wall, the chairs, the table, the candlesticks of 
brass and the bed that old Heggarty had died in. 

It was not the preparation of collecting his prop- 
erty that he made, for all these things he would 
leave, except the crucifix and that he would carry 
under the cover of his coat when he went walking 
the world again to find another resting-place. It 
was the severance of his mind from the place that 
had grown upon him which was his occupation all 
the length of that day. 

In the early morning, while the sun was yet hid- 
den by the hills like a furnace rising out of the deep 
hollows into flame, he rose from his bed and went 
up to the lake where the woman with the beauty of 
Anna Quartermaine had first appeared to him in all 
the dreams that were coming to his sleep. This he 
did to test the strength he had in his going, for there 
yet were voices calling to him to be staying where he 
was; crying out that he was born a man and the 
joys and the pleasures of a man were his by the right 
of the mother who had borne him. 

It was when he saw the black water and the bub- 
259 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


bles rising white to the surface, that in his dreams 
had been her eyes, he knew how much strength 
had gone out of him, for his breath came quickly 
and he felt the warmth of her arms she had put about 
him and there came again, rushing to his ears, the 
noise of the music as the darkness of the water had 
closed over them. 

By the side of the lake then he sat down and 
what had been prayers in any other man were 
thoughts and wonderings in him. And he pressed 
his eyes to blindness as he had done in Malachi’s 
cabin, but could not shut out the sound of the voices 
that called to him or the warm lights that brought 
heat to the blood in his veins. 

He was knowing then how near he had come to 
the destruction of all that was highest in his soul 
and he rose from the stone on which he had been 
sitting and came down the mountain to his cabin 
again, saying all the time as he walked: “To- 
morrow must see me gone — to-morrow must see me 
gone.” 

But when it came towards evening and the light 
was paling and the sky had faded to primrose, he 
looked at his bed and feared the last night that he 
must sleep upon it for the dreams that might come 
to him and the warm beauty of the woman they might 
bring to his side. 

It was the last strength he needed to keep him to 
the determination his mind was set upon, yet it was 
the last strength he knew was failing in him then. 
Another night of his dreams and in the morning 
260 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

he knew that courage might well have gone from 
him. 

At the square of his little window he sat, looking 
down the mountain slope and across the moorlands 
to the cluster of trees that hid the faint roofs of the 
houses in Ballysaggartmore. And as he looked, the 
name of the woman whose beauty had brought him 
both pain and destruction came hesitating to his lips, 
for fear of the longing it might bring to him. 

But as he said it, there seemed to return to him 
that strength when he had said good-bye to her in 
her happy garden. He gave it leave to pass his 
lips again and then he knew where he could find the 
strength to face that night alone. 

One moment’s sight of her — the sight, no more — 
would restore once again the power of his ideal, 
would equip him with courage to bear the burden 
of that last and lonely night. 

He rose, quick to his feet, strong in the warmth 
of his new conviction. She had inspired him to the 
knowledge of the truth he had learnt in those years 
of his solitude. Then it was she again who should 
arm him against the fears and the terrors that beset 
him now. It was only he who had failed when he 
had returned from their last parting, only the man 
in him that had cried out after the beauty of her 
he had set aside. So near had his failure been, 
that the faeries had heard the voice of his weakness 
and nearly had the prophetic words of Mrs. Coyne 
that night come true. 

But now, seeing her once again, would not she who 
261 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


had brought him so close to the knowledge of tnth, 
bring him strength until he could put the miles of 
the mountains, the rivers and the winding roids 
between them? 

He strode out fast from his cabin door and his 
feet were swift and sure down the side of the hills 
to the moor. 

The evening light of primrose was turning to 
sullen mauve. Across the mountains a summer 
storm was rolling up the heavy banks of clouds. 
He had no covering to his head and took no heed 
of the sudden murmurs of the wind that rose a warn- 
ing in his ears. 

All that his mind was holding now was the thought 
of the virtue this sight of her once more would bring 
him. From the window in his cabin, Malachi saw 
him go and beat his hands upon his head lest evil 
might befall him. 

“May the Holy Mother of God and all the saints 
be guarding the feet of him now,” he muttered, 
“and may the Lord God turn his back to destruc- 
tion through the long hours of the night.” 

So, with Malachi’s blessing that never reached 
his ears, he went seeking the blessing of her he had 
placed in the holy place of his soul where men en- 
shrine the mother they love and those few women 
of the world who are beyond reproach. 

The clouds were up and about the sky when he 
came by the mountain footpath into Ballysaggart- 
more. They wrapped the trees in darkness and 
all beneath them was a heavy gloom. No rain was 
262 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


falling, but out of the far east came sudden bursts 
of light that heralded up the rising storm. 

It was never his intention that night to speak to 
Anna Quartermaine, wherefore, there being none 
about upon the Lismore road, he climbed a low wall 
and dropped into the garden where he had walked 
with her before. 

A light was burning in the room he knew she 
sat in and, creeping down the garden path, he came 
to the very window where it was. 

The scent of the flowers, now roses and the lupin 
tree, was like an incense heavy in the air. He made 
his way through it as though faintness must come 
to him before he reached the object that he sought. 

A chink in the blind gave him sight within and 
there she sat, with hands folded in her lap, her eyes 
half closed, just watching the quiet progress of her 
thoughts as comes with idle meditation. 

Never had he seen her dressed as then, in a soft 
loose gown with shortened sleeves and hanging silken 
belt that gently bound her waist around and fell 
down to her feet. 

“How have I dared to love her less!” he whis- 
pered in his breath and the very softness of the 
line of her bare arm, the shoulders turned towards 
him and even the faint color of her skin brought 
him in wonder and amazement to the sense of sacred 
things, as when a man looks upon a picture of the 
Mother of God feeding the Infant Christ at her 
naked breast. 

So he had meant to think of her; so he thought 
263 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


of her still and more than ever when he saw her 
sitting there. She was the embodiment of all the 
highest that his soul could reach to, just as that 
faerie in the mountains was the symbol of the over- 
whelming emotions whereby he was a man. 

Then, as he watched her, came all the strength he 
needed to his soul and he would have had courage 
to speak with her then, for the fear of himself had 
gone out of him; but because of the grandness of 
the room where she sat and the fine clothes that 
were on her and the string of pearls that was about 
her bare neck, he did not dare, but stood there in 
silence with watching eyes looking through the chink 
in the blind. 

It was presently there came a dog barking at him 
from beyond the house and it stood in the garden 
some yards from where he was and snarled at him, 
but he had no fear of it and never took his eyes 
away from the chink in the blind. 

At the sound of the dog barking, she looked up 
and, as it snarled outside in the darkness, she rose to 
her feet and crossed the room to the window where 
he was standing. 

And it was as if some spell were cast on him 
where he stood, for, though he had the wish to hide 
himself from her then, he could not move. So 
when she pulled back the blind to look out into the 
darkness, she saw him standing there and he heard 
the cry that came out of her lips and thought it was 
fear at the sudden sight of him. 

They were long windows that opened to the 
264 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


ground and when some moments had gone by, she 
unfastened the catch and held the window wide. 

“Anthony Sorel,” she said and the Voice with 
which she spoke was almost below the sound of her 
breath. But he heard her say his name and knew 
then how the faerie in the mountains that night 
had stolen from her even the beauty of her voice, 
for the sound of it was like a sword thrust into his 
heart, so that he could only stand there in silence, 
with no word that he could say and trembling in 
himself for the pain that it brought him. 


CHAPTER XVII 


S HE said no more than his name and stood upon 
one side so that he must see it was her wish 
for him to come within. 

It was as one moving in a dream he obeyed and 
when he was in the room, she closed the window 
behind him, then turned, standing there until her 
eyes had made sure of what she saw. 

“Why have you come like this?” she asked at last 
and came to his side, and waited there until he should 
answer her. But as yet, he could not speak. His 
tongue was dead. He could not feel it in his mouth. 

She waited, watching the fear and the wonder in 
his eyes, and when still he did not speak, she laid a 
hand on his arm, asking again. 

He found his voice, but it was not the voice he 
knew of as his own, for it seemed to be far away 
in him and the sound of it came to his ears as an 
echo comes that beats back with its hollow note 
across the hills. 

“I came for the last sight of you,” he said simply, 
“before I go out of the mountains up there and 
set out further away into the West.” 

She took her hand away from him and stood 
alone. 

“You’re leaving your cabin in Knockshunahal- 
lion?” she asked. 


266 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


He bent his head. 

“When?” 

“To-morrow — as soon as the sun is up.” 

“Why?” 

With all the longing that was in him to find the 
full measure of her understanding, he yet felt it 
impossible to tell her why. Perhaps a consciousness 
in the luxury of those surroundings made him feel 
the strangeness of his own life, the different being 
he was to her, the separate planes in which they 
moved and the sudden fear, when he found her thus 
so far from the touch of the Nature with which he 
lived, that the ideal he had made of her might well 
not be the woman that she was. 

“Can’t you tell me why?” she asked. 

He looked long at her then, hardly believing 
her the same woman he had seen those days upon 
the open stretches of his mountain land, yet clinging 
desperately in his heart to the one ideal that he had 
found in her. For now it was her beauty most of 
all he saw, the soft transparency of her skin, the 
color of her lips, the deep and peaceful lights that 
looked out from her eyes; her hair, its dark, warm 
color too; even the comb of some green jade that 
nestled there like a snake in hiding in the earth; 
even that he saw as well. 

He found no blame in her for this, but knew it 
was the shadow of the spell the faeries had cast deep 
upon his soul. So he closed his eyes as she stood 
before him and tried to think alone upon the greater 
beauty she had brought him first. 

18 267 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“Do you remember the words of Mrs. Coyne?” 
he asked her presently — “that night when I brought 
you down the mountains to Gorteeshall?” 

“I remember,” she replied. 

But though she said she remembered them, he 
repeated them aloud to her then. 

“ ’Tis not that sort of wisdom will be sthandin’ 
to ye and ye taken by the faeries yeerself where the 
roads are crossed and the night comes batterin’ wid 
the wind across the mountains at yeer little door.” 

“I remember them — every word,” she said again. 

He opened his eyes now and he looked at her. 

“They were true words,” said he. “Didn’t I say 
as we listened, that she spoke with authority?” 

Now again she came close to his side and then he 
knew that the perfumes that had come to his senses 
were not only the scents of the flowers in her garden, 
but the scent of the perfume she wore upon her 
body; that without his knowing it, it had entered 
into the consciousness of his mind and lain there 
until such time as when the weakness of his spirit 
was upon him. 

She saw the trembling that passed through him 
as she touched his arm and instinctively her fingers 
tightened in their hold. 

“How have the words come true?” she asked. 

Then he told her how the faeries had come to 
him and of the woman whose beauty was the beauty 
she had stolen from Anna Quartermaine to bring it 
there tempting him into the mountains. 

“Why tempting you?” she asked. 

268 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


He took her hand from his arm, needing that for- 
titude to bear the touch of her. She turned with 
her eyes always watching him as he went to the win- 
dow and looked out. What he thought of then, 
she might perhaps have known, but it was the spoken 
word she wanted and waited for it from his lips. 

And when it seemed he would not utter the spoken 
word, she would not let him free of it, but asked 
again. 

“Why tempting you?” said she. 

“Because I am just a man after all,” he answered. 
“These years of loneliness have brought me 
knowledge of the truth but not the power to grasp 
it. Why do you ask me to explain? The explana- 
tion I should give to you might be understood but 
not by the woman you are to me.” 

“What am I to you?” she murmured. 

He drew his breath deep for the want of his 
words. 

“The thing only a woman can be,” said he, 
“to a man only when he loves. It’s so easy a thing 
to desire — and so hard a thing to love, and isn’t 
there all the distance between them, that stretches 
from the highest heaven to the furthest earth?” 

She told him she saw no difference and he was 
marveling at that then, thinking that in the ideal he 
had made of her, he knew her better than she knew 
herself. 

“Aren’t the two things one,” said she, “woven 
so close and interwoven that it would go hard for 
you to know which was which?” 

269 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


He sat down by the side of her where she was 
sitting and made for her stories that he knew or had 
learnt from the people in their cottages and they 
all said the same thing — that the heart of a man is 
as fuel in the needs of his body and that desire will 
burn out love as peat is burnt on the floor of the 
open grate. 

And when he had made an end of his stories, to 
which she had listened in all silence, she looked at 
him and held his eyes with her eyes so that she 
might yet know his answer should he not reply. 

And this was what she asked him. 

“Do you love me?” she said. 

He gave some moments to silence before he an- 
swered, but did not hesitate in the steady glance of 
his eyes. 

“Yes — ” he said presently and felt the power and 
virtue of his manhood that he could say it, in the 
stillness of his heart, without trembling, as he had 
been trembling those days, or even thinking of the 
beauty that was in her face as he had thought of it 
when he saw it in the face of the faerie woman on 
the hill. 

“And you are going away?” 

“Right away,” said he, “out into'the West where 
the sounds of the sea are the silences that come 
into a man’s mind.” 

“Aren’t there silences in the mountains surely?” 
she asked him. 

And he shook his head. 

“These last still nights, when never a breath has 
270 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


been whispering in the thorn trees and you could 
hear the water trickling through the moss between 
the stones, there has been the babel of voices in my 
ears, so that the silent hills were ringing with the 
noise of them. Silence, solitude — like love itself — 
all these things are in the wind. To-night I shall 
go back into the mountains, having seen you this last 
time, and through all this storm that will howl about 
my cabin door, there will be such silence in my soul 
as I have not heard for many days. Then the voices 
will be still, for it is you can kill the self in me and 
all the desires that come in a torment in my sleep.” 

And now she asked him was it love of her it 
could be, if it took him away from her and put 
the miles of the roads and the rivers between them. 

“Can you love me and leave me too?” she asked. 

He reached out for the words that he had, to 
explain the things that he meant. 

“It’s not you I’m leaving,” he cried out to her, 
“but myself. One more night than this in those 
mountains and because of the weakness and desire 
that is in me, the words of Mrs. Coyne would be 
true. The faeries would take me and never again 
should I be the man I have been these two years 
gone and all the hope of the great things that I had 
would be lost. Didn’t I show you Mary Coyne 
whose own beauty was the emotion that brought her 
to the end? Wasn’t it the faeries that came with 
the lights that she saw and the music that she heard 
and didn’t they bring the last destruction to her 
soul? And can’t you see that the Fate of the faeries 
271 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


is upon me as well? By prayer and fasting, by 
walking this way on the roads and that way on the 
roads, I have tired the body in me, so that only in 
dreams has the woman with your beauty that she 
stole come near to me again. And now to-morrow 
I shall be gone and all the emotion that over- 
whelmed me will be put away and I sitting by the 
rocks that look over the silence of the tempest of 
the sea.” 

“What a wonderful madness it all is,” said she, 
as though with a light from the far illumination of 
his mind, for she had for the instant caught sight 
of the ideal for which he strove. 

“And what a wonderful love it will be,” he an- 
swered, “when I can love you as I talk to you now 
and my heart will no longer be the fuel in the fur- 
nace of my body.” 

She turned away and what moved her she could 
not think, but she went to the window and stood 
there looking out into the rushing wind and the 
lightning that flashed out where no rain seemed 
promised to assuage the storm. 

At last she turned again. 

“What does this other woman and her beauty 
mean to you?” she asked. 

“Haven’t I told you,” he replied, “what all 
faeries mean — that symbol of the emotions by which 
we are overwhelmed. She is the symbol of my lower 
self, that cannot love but only knows desire.” 

“And with the beauty that you find in me?” said 
she. 


272 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


He bent his head. 

“Then is not that the way you love me too?” 

To which he cried out, “No — ” and “No — ” 
and “No” again. 

“That is the way I love myself,” he said. 
“There’s not one word that you could utter or which, 
as I am, could make me long for you.” 

She dropped her hands in a gesture of despair. 

“I — I cannot understand,” said she. “It sounds 
very wonderful, that’s all that I can say. I’ve never 
thought of love like this in all my life and cannot 
understand it even now the thought has come to me. 
Why should this faerie woman with the beauty I 
have, contain such power in her that as I stand here 
is denied to me?” 

“Some women only have one power,” said he — 
“the power to make men love themselves. You have 
the power with me to make me love the spirit that 
is all of truth and is not mine or any man’s but be- 
longs to the world of men itself. She has the beauty 
that my eyes have seen in you, that my body needs, 
that wake all the storms and tumults of emotion in 
the silence I had gathered in my mind. That is 
what I am going to leave behind me and only love 
of you that I take. And if I am or if I’m not the 
man that you would ever love, time will bring us 
proof. If I am not, you’ll know that you have been 
the greatest hope a man has ever striven to secure. 
And that is love, the thing that makes us know the 
spirit that we have. I only go, because I must learn 
the truth that is in me.” 


273 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


He moved to the window by which she had let 
him in. But in the sudden fear of losing him, she 
caught his hand. 

“Do you hate the other woman?” she asked. 

“No,” said he. “I only hate myself.” 

He bent and touched the hand that held him with 
his lips and before she could stay him, had uncaught 
the window fastening and was gone. 

The black storm of the night took him as a body 
is sucked down into a whirlpool. For one instant 
she heard his footsteps on the garden path and 
then the silence he had spoken of was an emptiness 
and a pain in her heart. 


CHAPTER XVIII 


A NTHONY SOREL came up into the moun- 
tains again by the narrow track across the 
moors where the peat carts would be going, 
making their two deep ruts in the soft, mossy earth 
and beating out a smooth pathway where the hoofs 
of the horses and the jennets would be falling. 

By this way it was passing Crow Hill and Mal- 
achi’s cabin he would be and the storm of the wind 
was blowing about him with the strength of great 
waves in a wild sea and sometimes the way before 
him that was black with the heaviness of the night 
was lit up by the lightning flashes, and the sound of 
the thunder was like the rush of the great rocks 
that sometimes are loosened and would be tumbling 
down the mountain’s side. 

But the noise of the storm, just as he had said, 
was nothing to him now, for now there was an 
abounding stillness in the far depths of his mind 
that no storm of the wind, no thunder or lightning 
could disturb. 

Whether the ideal he had made of Anna Quar- 
termaine was the real woman she was or not, meant 
nothing to him then; whether the surroundings in 
which he found her — so distinct and high above his 
own — had contributed to these lofty and almost un- 
earthly impressions of her, he did not stop to think. 
275 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


Realities were not in the dealings of his mind. She 
had inspired him to the greatness of his purpose 
surely. That sight of her had given him the strength 
he had desired. He climbed up the mountain path, 
singing as he went for the courage now that was in 
him. The dread of the night had passed away in 
the exaltation that he had. Now he could prove 
to himself that in the sacrifice of love, there was 
no belittling emotion of desire and when that was 
proved would he not have the greatest thing a man 
can possess to offer her? 

At the door of Malachi’s cottage he thought to 
pass, then knocked, saying to himself it was for the 
last time and with more truth than ever he could 
have known. 

The old man opened the door and the wind caught 
it from his hands and flung it wide. 

“Is it still walking the roads ye are,” said he, 
“and ye desthroyed surely the way yeer clothes do 
be hanging and flapping on yeer bones?” 

“ ’Tis not destroyed I am,” said Anthony Sorel, 
“but a new man who can face all the terrors of this 
night and will be making his way into the West with 
the morning light of the day.” 

“God be wid that day,” said Malachi mournfully, 
“and may ye get the great name by the songs 
ye’d be singing when there’ll be but the bare 
silence of these hills to wake me and I coming to 
my sleep.” 

He held open the door against the wind, but 
Anthony Sorel would not come within for the need 
276 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

of the sleep that was on him and the weakness it 
brought. 

“Would I pass your door the last night,” said he, 
“if the pain of sleep was twice as heavy on my 
eyes? Would I pass your door and not be telling 
you ’twas the strength I had got by me again, the 
way I’d be going no more into the valley or the 
townland where my songs would be destroyed 
and the soul in me become a warped and a little 
thing?” 

“Where did ye come by the power of it now,” 
asked Malachi, “and ye wid the sweat on yeer face 
was weak like a young lamb sucking the dead? 
Where did ye come by the power of it at all?” he 
inquired. 

Anthony Sorel told him where he had been and 
the strength he had found from the last sight of the 
woman that he loved. 

Before he had finished there was the sound of 
mirthless, hollow laughter in the old man’s voice. 
He raised his hands above his head and there he 
shook them in the air. 

“May the Lord God Almighty have the keeping 
of yeer soul,” said he, “for the sense has gone out 
of ye and aren’t the wits lost on ye to be doing a 
mad thing the like of that?” 

“What madness is there in the thing I’ve done?” 
Anthony Sorel asked. 

“Yirra, isn’t that the way all men are mad that 
do be walking the earth the way ’tis in the power 
of them to leave a woman be and she drawin’ them 
277 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


wid her eyes could draw the sthones down the moun- 
tainsides ?” 

“Didn’t I tell ye these days gone by, not to be 
speaking the parting word to herself? And wasn’t 
it the truth I was saying that her voice would be 
coming to ye in the fall of the night and she crying 
out with the want of women for the nature is in 
them? Glory be to God, have they put the sthroke 
on ye that yeer wits do be gone with walking the 
hills and crying out there in yeer cabin for the looks 
she’d be having in her eyes and the wet touch of 
her lips?” 

He turned away from him as from one that is 
past all healing, standing by his window and rocking 
himself to and fro. 

“I shall be gone to-morrow,” said Anthony Sorel. 
“Must I be saying it again? To-morrow I shall 
be gone and all the twists and the turns of the road 
and the walls of the hills will be between us. ’Tis 
herself has given me power to be facing this night 
alone and our parting said and she knowing the way 
I’d be loving her and never raising a hand to hold 
me back.” 

“Is it raise her hand she would!” exclaimed 
Malachi sorrowfully. “Is it the hand of a woman 
ever held a man yet, when the thoughts she puts in 
him with the look of her eyes and the kisses she 
has for him on her lips, are things mightier than 
her hands would be for the holding? Yirra — is it 
gone he’d be when a man says good-bye to a woman? 
It is not. D’ye mind me now, for the hours of the 
278 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


night are still before ye and ye sitting alone in the 
storm in yeer little room and shan’t I be praying 
God on me two knees bended that the light of the 
day shall be coming fast till ye’d be gone?” 

“She’s said good-bye and she’s let me go,” said 
Anthony Sorel. “Isn’t that enough? And aren’t I 
strong to be going and isn’t there power in me I 
never had these days that are past?” 

And then an anger came into him with his pride 
that was hurt and he cried out that never would 
Malachi know the virtue of the love that he had or 
the exaltation that it brought to his soul. And the 
old man bent his head, saying he was no maker of 
songs, nor had he the tongue of the poet in his 
head. 

“Maybe ’tis the years that are on me,” said he, 
“and I dried up and withered with age, could not 
remember the blood has gone dancing through me 
veins. For ’tis easy a man would be forgetting the 
love that he had in the days of his youth when the 
thorn trees would blossom for the pleasure of his 
eyes. Shure the madness of love is a great thing, 
but when yeer heart is dry with the years that are 
on ye, then ’tis the way the thorn trees would blos- 
som in the want of their seed and divil a bit is it 
for the pleasure of yeer eyes. Let ye go now, An- 
thony Sorel, and be taking yeer madness away there 
up into the hills and when the blossoms fall and 
the seed-pods do be opening their mouths, let ye seek 
in yeer heart for the words I’ve said this night, for 
never to my knowing do the blossoms be parting 
279 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


from the tree till the seeds be set and the winds of 
God do be scattering them east and west in the 
soft and fruitful corners of the earth. And where 
would the songs of a man he’d be singing be then 
when the blossom was gone and the pleasures be 
dead in the heart of him?” 


CHAPTER XIX 


T HE door of Anthony Sorel’s cabin was rat- 
tling in the storm of the wind and it was 
when he had reached it and his hand was on 
the latch that the words Malachi had spoken came 
with the truth that they had into his mind. So it 
was he stood there without entering as one who 
listens for the sound of a voice or a movement 
within. But the voice was in himself and it was the 
voice of Malachi and over and over again it was 
saying, 

“Never to my knowing do the blossoms be parting 
from the tree till the seeds be set and the winds of 
God do be scattering them east and west in the 
soft and fruitful corners of the earth.” 

It was they in their youth were the blossoms of 
the tree, he meant. It was in them the seeds should 
be set by the winds of God. 

And then again he heard the voice of Malachi 
and it was saying, 

“The madness of love is a great thing, but when 
your heart is dry with the years that are on ye, 
then ’tis the way the thorn trees would blossom in 
the want of their seed and divil a bit is it for the 
pleasure of yeer eyes.” 

He flung the door open wide and went in and 
seated himself down on the stool in the chimney 
281 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


corner, and set himself, in anger at his thoughts, to 
the making of his fire that was black and cold in a 
bed of white ashes. 

Was it the truth? Was it the truth? Was love 
the deceiving emotion that only conjured be- 
fore the eyes of youth? Could no woman be the 
inspiration of the highest beauty and the greatest 
truth ? 

The wood he had brought to the grate burnt up 
into flame and he felt the first warmth of it stealing 
into his blood. 

Surely the tree in its blossoming was a truth in 
itself — a beauty alone, if the eye would but choose 
to see it. Not everything was a means to an end. 
His love of the woman from whom he had parted, 
that was a thing in itself, a blossom from which no 
seed need come to complete the beauty and the truth 
that it was. Weren’t there emotions other than the 
emotions of Nature that moved in man? Was there 
not the spirit in him that stood, alone, as he soon 
would be standing, when the winding of the roads 
and the length of the rivers would be set between 
them? 

The whole object of his life depended on it that 
it were so, but just when he thought he had found 
comfort in that, came the words of Malachi back 
into his mind until they sung in the air about his 
head and all his senses were tricked by the sound 
of them. 

He was struggling now to keep back the conscious 
self in him and every word of Malachi’s that re- 
282 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


turned to him, he flung from his mind like a man 
that is beset on all sides. 

“May never a man be parted from a woman,” 
he cried out aloud, “till the nature that is in them 
shall come to its own fulfillment! Is there never a 
blossom that falls from the tree, but what the seed 
is already set in the hour of its parting! Is pleasure 
the only reward that a man desires, and the only 
gift that Nature has to give him!” 

And then the silence came over him, and the 
warmth of the fire was about him as he sat, and the 
storm came battering across the mountains at his 
little door. 

It was presently in a despair that he rose from the 
persecution of his thoughts and set about making a 
cup of tea for himself and cut a piece of bread from 
a loaf that was in the house. And when he had 
eaten the bread and drunk the steaming liquid, he 
came back to his stool in the corner of the chimney. 

“The last night,” he said aloud and looked about 
him, at the rafters in the thatch, the smoke-colored 
walls, the bed he had slept on at nights for the two 
years that had passed and a sadness came over him 
to think he must be gone from it so soon. For life 
seemed a thing to be weary of then, and as he 
thought of the long roads before him to the West 
and the nights that he must be traveling and all the 
days when he would be searching for a roof to cover 
his head, he could have wished to lie down where 
he was for the fatigue and the sadness that was 
over him. 


19 


283 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


Then when he had said that and the thoughts it 
had brought had passed away from him, he looked 
back again into the rich heart of the glowing fire. 
It was warm to the slumber in his eyes and he saw 
faces there that smiled at him and they were faces 
of women he had known before the hope came to 
him of his own mastery. 

At first he shut his eyes and tried to hide them 
from his mind where the sacred image of the woman 
he loved was lying. The thought of them was sacri- 
lege to be thought of with her. But it was as though 
their voices were calling him, so that he opened his 
eyes again. And first one and then another spoke 
to him with the looks that they had in their eyes 
and the gentleness of the words they seemed to say 
with their lips. And he heard their pity for the 
weariness that was aching in his body, for each one 
seemed to be saying out of the past: “Lay your 
head on my breast and sleep and sleep and I will 
watch your eyes till the morning wakes you.” 

These were not thoughts but things that he saw 
as he sat by the fire and things that he heard as the 
storm raged across the mountains with beating gusts 
upon his little door. Often he shut his eyes that he 
might see no more of them and pressed his hands 
to his ears that he might hear no more. But his 
eyes opened and again his hands fell in his lap and 
he began wishing that the face and the voice of Anna 
Quartermaine would come in their stead, rather than 
that he should find comfort in things of the past he 
had forever put behind him. 

284 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


It was no sooner that he had wished, than 
the faces melted in the flames and out of the heart 
of the fire there rose the face of Anna Quarter- 
maine, and her eyes were more sad than any of 
the eyes of the women he had just seen and her lips 
were murmuring softer words than ever they had 
uttered. 

There was a fear that came upon him then, that 
he had wished for the thing that was evil in him; 
but now he could no longer close his eyes and his 
hands were clutched upon his knees so that he could 
not press them to his ears. 

So he tried in his mind not to hear what she said, 
but her voice in all its gentleness was above the roar- 
ing of the storm and the eyes that looked out at him 
were brighter than the fire itself. 

And he heard her say, 

“Why do you squander your days in the ceaseless 
labor of your soul?” and as she spoke, he could 
not tell whether it was he was thinking the words, 
or she who spoke them. For after that it seemed 
that he heard a phrase that came out of the days of 
his childhood: “Consider the lilies of the field — 
they toil not, neither do they spin — ” and he won- 
dered had she said that of herself, or had he thought 
it, because of Malachi’s speaking of the blossom on 
the thorn trees. 

But because it had seemed to come out of her 
voice, he answered aloud in his own and it sounded 
far away, as if it came on the wings of the storm 
and had been blown to him across the lonely stretches 

285 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

of the hills till there was nothing human in it that 
was left. 

“What is the life of a man,” he said, “when it 
ceases from the endless labor of his soul?” 

And she answered to him out of the fire, 

“The life of a flower that blows in beauty and 
in beauty droops to the earth and is dead.” 

Then he thought it must be the voice of Malachi 
that was speaking to him still out of her lips and 
he clung again to the ideal he had of her and his 
eyes closed with the weight of the slumber and the 
weakness of resistance that was on him and he 
swayed on the seat where he sat. 

Then the light of the fire and the sight of her 
face that he saw, went out of his eyes and it was 
that he knew he was overtaken by sleep. Yet still 
he could hear the moan of the storm as it rushed 
across the mountains and still he could see the light- 
ning when it lit up the corners of his room. 

And whether it was in a dream or a thing that 
had happened, he did not know, but it seemed in 
his sleep that he opened his eyes, when upon the 
other side of the chimney where he sat, there was 
an old man whom he knew to be the life that was 
weary in him. There was in his hands a pack of 
cards, crumpled and worn and marked with the 
many hands that had held them and he was counting 
them through his fingers as one who is waiting to 
play. 

It was when he saw that Anthony Sorel’s eyes were 
open, that he pulled a chair between them, as though 
286 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


this it was for which he had been waiting and he 
dealt out the cards from the pack with his hands 
that were the color of unwashed clay. 

Then in silence they played — a game of forty- 
five — and when Anthony Sorel saw the money they 
played for were the pips out of the core of an apple, 
then he said aloud as he played: “This is a dream,” 
for he knew that it was the things Malachi had 
said of the seeds of the thorn trees that had been 
fixed in the web of his brain. 

And the old man when he had said that answered, 

“The whole of life is a dream — it is only death is 
the awakening.” 

So they played on and it seemed to Anthony 
Sorel as he shuffled the cards that at all costs he 
must not lose the seeds of the apple he had in his 
hand for that they were dearer to him than gold 
and though in his consciousness he cared nothing for 
the wealth of gold, it seemed that gold was power 
to him then and that the seeds were even dearer 
than power. 

But one by one they were taken from him, for all 
the luck of the cards came to the old man and there 
was skill with him too, so that at last there was but 
one seed left in his hand and he cried out aloud, 

“If this is lost from me where shall I be?” 

And the old man dealt the cards and answered, 

“What are the seeds of life to you?” 

At which in the fear of losing, Anthony Sorel 
threw over the chair that was between them, and the 
sound of it falling opened his eyes from the sleep 
287 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


that he had, when he saw the chair thrown down at 
his feet. And the things he had thought were the 
cards with which they played, were a sheaf of his 
poems that the wind of the storm had gathered 
and scattered about the room. 

So he wondered how the wind had come in for 
the door had been closed, but when he looked up, 
the door was open and there on the threshold stood 
the woman of faerie with the beauty of Anna Quar- 
termaine in her face. 


CHAPTER XX 


A NTHONY SOREL that was fresh from sleep 
closed his eyes because in the moment of 
waking from his dream, he thought the 
sight had been deceived in him. But when he opened 
them again, the woman of the faeries was still there 
and now the door was closed behind her. 

Yet she came no further into the room, but stood 
there with the distance of the uneven mud floor 
between them, as if it needed some word from him 
to give her invitation. 

But he could not speak, for the only words in 
his mind were the words of Mrs. Coyne when she 
said, “ ’Tis not that sort of wisdom will be sthand- 
in’ to ye and ye taken by the faeries yeerself where 
the roads are crossed and the night comes batterin’ 
with the wind across the mountains at yeer little 
door.” 

Now the night indeed was battering with the wind 
across the mountains at his cabin door, and there she 
stood that was come from the faeries themselves 
and, like a cloud that is big with rain, he felt 
the hour to be heavy with the fate that was over 
him. 

“ ’Tis a lonely man ye are this night, Anthony 
Sorel,” said she at last in the softest accent of her 
brogue, “and ye goin’ the wild ways of the starvin’ 
289 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


roads when day would be come and the sun setting 
up in the heavens.” 

It brought no wonder to him that she knew he 
was about to depart. Since that first moment of 
amazement when she had spoken his name on the 
hillside, he knew that nothing was there that could 
be hid from her. 

“Couldn’t you leave me the peace of these hours,” 
said he mournfully, “when ’tis sleep that I need to 
be finding the strength of the man that was in me?” 

She made a movement to come to the chair he 
had thrown down in his sleep, and though he cried 
out to her to be staying where she was nor come 
nearer one step to him, she took no heed but smiled 
gently at the fear in his voice and picked up the chair 
as it lay and seated herself there by the fire. 

It was then as he looked at her, that his senses 
swung in a void where there was no power of his 
will. For the perfume that had been about Anna 
Quartermaine was now in his nostrils and her voice 
continued from the moment of her silence like a 
soft music that destroyed the truth of all sound in his 
ears; and as he looked in her face he heard the 
words of Anna Quartermaine that she had spoken to 
him out of the fire when she said: “Why do you 
squander your days in the ceaseless labor of your 
soul?” 

He clenched his hands till the nails were biting 
of his palms in his effort to regain the balance of 
his resistance which in that moment had almost gone 
from him. 


290 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


“Couldn’t you leave me in peace?” he said again. 

“Was there peace in the sleep that ye had?” she 
replied. “Yirra, wasn’t I sthandin’ at the door and 
ye moanin’ and cryin’ out like a dog would be lost 
on the mountain land? And didn’t ye throw down 
the chair with the fret that was on ye? Shure what 
rest would ye be getting out of sleep is the like of 
a tossin’ dream? Isn’t it the sleep of a babe, do be 
lying in the hook of its mother’s arm, ye’d be want- 
ing? An’ isn’t it cornin’ all these ways over the 
mountain sthones I’d be, to be bringin’ the sleep to 
yeer eyes an’ I with no vamps at all an’ me feet cut 
an’ bleedin’?” 

“Wouldn’t I sooner be awake all night,” said he, 
“than be sleeping so?” 

She took no notice of his words and it was as if 
he had not spoken, for without answering, she lifted 
one of her bare feet and there was the broken skin 
and the little trickling streams of blood where the 
stones had cut against her as she walked. 

He followed her eyes with his eyes where she 
looked and when he saw the pain of the wounds on 
her ankles and about the soles of her feet, he felt 
all that pity as he would have felt for a human 
thing and went to the door that opened at the back 
of his room and passed out. 

She smiled up at him when he came back with a 
bowl of soft rain-water in his hands and watched 
him with a look of gratitude in her eyes as he washed 
her feet of the earth and the blood that was fast 
upon them. And when he made an end of drying 
291 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


them with a cloth he had brought as well, she slipped 
gently a hand on his head as he knelt at her feet, 
and drew it down upon the softness of her lap and 
bending down over him she whispered: “Let ye be 
sleepin’ so now and my eyes will be watchin’ ye till 
the mornin\” 

Then, though he knew they were the words of 
the voices he had heard out of the fire, and though 
the soul in him cried out that he was losing sight of 
the ideal that he had, yet for a time he stayed where 
he was, thinking, in the weariness of his body, of 
the peace such sleep would be. 

She bent over him presently to see had the sleep 
come yet to his aching eyes and when she saw they 
were open and fixed in a staring wakefulness on the 
glow of the fire, she whispered again in his ear, 

“Why would ye be suffering the pain of a man is 
wandering the starving land for a bite or a sup while 
the hunger that is through him would be feeding on 
his bones? What’s this madness ye have on ye?” 

And her voice as she asked him' was soft with the 
voice of women whose nature it is to minister to 
the needs of men. 

He heard that note it was never her thought to 
conceal and he looked up into her face from where 
he sat, wondering why he had never consciously 
known the beauty of Anna Quartermaine so well as 
he knew it now in this creature of faerie who had 
stolen the beauty that she had. For whereas in 
Anna Quartermaine he had allowed only the spirit in 
him to be stirred by the light of her eyes, the sound 
292 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


of her voice and the beauty of her mind, yet now, 
with that same beauty before him, it was not the 
hope in his soul that he thought of, but weariness 
of his body and the need of his sleep and the sweet 
danger of the peace that she brought him. 

“Why did you walk all these ways on the road 
and up the paths of the lifting hills to be coming to 
me the nights when the man that was strong in me 
had face? Why did the faeries send you this night 
of all the nights when the man that was strong in 
me had dropped to the weakness of water would be 
trickling willy-nilly through the moss?” 

She stroked the hair of his head with the linger- 
ing motion of her hand, and with every touch of it, 
he felt the passage of a stream of blood through his 
veins that was warm and giving him life while it 
brought him ease of the pains of weariness that he 
had. 

“Didn’t I know it was beaten and bruised ye 
were,” she answered, “and ye destroyed shurely by 
the pains of a man is gone to madness with the need 
would be in him?” 

“And what matter would that be making to 
you?” 

She passed the touch of her hand from his hair to 
his forehead that was damp with the sweat that was 
on him. And when he felt the gentleness of her 
lingers on his skin, he shivered and closed his eyes 
as it were more than he could bear. 

“Isn’t it the matter with all women,” she an- 
swered him then, “the way they must be the cause 
293 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


of all suffering would be in the very heart of them to 
appease?” 

“How did you know there was suffering in 
me?” 

“Didn’t I see ye,” said she, “and ye walkin’ 
the hills and didn’t I know the fear of yeer heart 
that was on ye and ye talkin’ and keepin’ the dis- 
tance of me that night? Will ye lay yeer head down 
now while my hands would be sthrokin’ ye, for isn’t 
it the want of the sleep is killin’ ye entirely?” 

He could not think whether it were obedience or 
not, but laid his head down once more in her lap 
and wished it were near to the hour of the morning 
for the powerlessness that had come over him. Yet 
as he lay there and she stroked his forehead with her 
hand, he could not close his eyes, but was wondering 
what Anna Quartermaine would think of all the 
fine words of his parting, if she could see him 
then. 

At last and at the very moment she was smiling 
because she believed the sleep had come to him, he 
leapt to his feet from her lap where he lay and 
shook off from him all the sensations of the touch of 
her hand. For now he could no longer bear the ac- 
cusation of the thoughts that beset him and a wild 
strength had come to his soul, as when a man fights 
fiercely at the very moment of his defeat or a candle 
shoots up the highest flame as it gutters and dies 
out. 

“This night — only this night,” he cried out, 
“there was I saying the parting word to the woman 
294 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


I love and what is this madness of ease has come 
over me now and what would she say of me to be 
playing with the danger that I am !” 

“If ’tis the woman is in her at all,” she answered 
him, “is it plaguing herself she’d be and ye takin’ 
ease from one has her own beauty stolen on her? 
Wouldn’t she liefer see ye sitting down in this place 
with one had the looks of her and ye thinkin’ maybe 
’twas her own lap had been nursin’ ye, than traipsing 
the hills and contriving the way ye’d forget the sight 
of her? If ’tis a woman she is, wouldn’t she rather 
be romancin’ that way with herself than not at 
all? Sit down here on the floor at my feet and 
let ye stretch out now for yeer sleep that has been 
these long days coming to ye and is behind ye 
yet.” 

If it was pity and consolation she had in her voice, 
he took none of them from the words that she said, 
but called upon the name of God to his witness that 
the woman he loved had kept him alone in those 
days to the trembling purpose of his ideal. 

“Wouldn’t she despise me now for the poor weak 
thing that I am,” said he bitterly, “and she, down 
there in the valley, thinking I’d be fighting alone the 
battle that’s in me !” 

She rose quietly to her feet and he trembled but 
did not move away as she came near to him. 

“If ’tis not afraid of her beauty ye are, the way 
ye can say the parting word when ye’re with her, 
why would ye be afraid of her beauty in me?” 

“ ’Tis not her beauty I’m afraid of now,” he 
295 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


answered, “but the fear is of myself. You are the 
thing in me that brings the fear into my heart. 
It’s not her beauty that you symbolize in the body 
that you have, but my own fear of myself and the 
emotions and desires that are overwhelming me. 
While I am with her, her beauty is nothing. I 
should not miss it to-morrow if it were gone, for the 
age of the years might rob her of it and beauty 
would still be in her mind for me to love. But when 
I am come away, then the passion that is in me 
brings her beauty close to my eyes. I grow fright- 
ened of the thing that I am and the desires that 
beset me. It is only then, when my emotions are 
upon me and I grow weak to resist, that my eyes 
see you, in the living form of the beauty that she 
has.” 

“ ’Tis the worst that I’d be in ye so?” said she 
sadly. 

He bent his head. 

“But shure isn’t every woman the good and the 
bad in a man?” she went on. “And might I not be 
the spirit of herself would be seekin’ the best and 
the worst in ye, the way no other woman would be 
cornin’ the ways of the roads and be stealin’ a part 
of the whole man that she loved?” 

He put his hand to his eyes, for the softness of 
her voice was becoming the sounds of music that 
floated about in the air above his head and came 
between the throbs of his senses and the power of his 
will. Then he knew how the strength he had gath- 
ered was fast going out of him and he put out his 
296 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


hands touching her arms, because he knew that in 
the warmth of them there was the forgetfulness of 
sleep to be found. 

So she stood there quietly, in a passive obedience 
to his touch, and only put back her head that when 
he opened his eyes he might see all the willingness 
of the beauty that was in her face. 

But it was as if he knew and was afraid to look 
at her. For then he summoned the faltering power 
of his will; his fingers tightened upon her arms and 
slowly and blindly he led her to the door and un- 
fastened the latch. 

“Where are we going ?” she whispered. 

“ ’Tis you are going,” he answered, “to the 
shadows of the hills and the mists that drive over 
the mountains from which you came.” 

“Is it putting me out in the storm again?” she 
murmured, “and I with the bare feet on me would 
be cut and bleeding with the sthones?” 

“The roads of the wind will be easier walking 
than the mountain paths,” said he. “Don’t I know 
’twas to soften the heart in me you came with the 
wet blood on your feet? Let you go by the roads 
of the wind and leave me to the torment of my 
soul alone.” 

She took his hand from the latch and fastened it 
back and her arms came about his neck when she 
saw that he meant them to be parted. 

“Ye won’t let me be goin’ this night,” she cried 
softly in his ear. “Aren’t there all the black hours 
till morning and wouldn’t ye be walkin’ the floor 
297 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


for the madness that’s in ye and never shutting yeer 
eyes in sleep?” 

In the last effort of his will and the purpose 
that was flickering in him he raised his voice. 

“For the sake of God, will ye go!” he cried. 

But she clung to him closer and her hands were 
now upon his face and her fingers were touching his 
eyes. And the strength then went out from him like 
water rushing and for the first moment since they 
were standing by the door, he opened his eyes and 
looked at her. 

The light of the fire was catching the line of her 
cheeks. He saw her lips were parted as she breathed 
and the whole air about them was full of the sounds 
as of a furnace that roared in his ears. Then he 
gave up the purpose of his soul and she took him in 
her arms and kissed the trembling thing that he was. 

So had the words of Mrs. Coyne come to the truth, 
for the night was battering with the wind across the 
mountains at his little door when Anthony Sorel lost 
all the wisdom that had stood to him and was taken 
by the faeries in Knockshunahallion. 


CHAPTER XXI 


T HE storm had beaten itself out and purged 
the heavens of their clouds of rain, the sun 
was mounted high in a sky of blue when An- 
thony Sorel awoke and saw the beauty of the face 
that was lying beside his upon the pillow. 

He had slept indeed without the torment of his 
dreams and with the peacefulness of rest that comes 
to the sleep of a child. And now that strength had 
returned to him, he was left in all the bitter con- 
templation of remorse. 

There were those he had heard of in the moun- 
tains whom the faeries had taken, who after some 
years came back — witless creatures with wild and 
staring eyes — to the people and the relations of 
their former life. Was he to become now one of 
these ? Had all hope of the purpose of his soul been 
destroyed in him? Was he to wander, as with those 
creatures the faeries had stolen, over the untrodden 
mountain paths, begging here a crust of bread and 
there a cup of water, until the spell of his own emo- 
tions had been taken from him and he was a free 
man once more? 

Yet what would that freedom mean when once it 
had come back to him? After those years, he too 
would be lost in his wits, the songs that he had sung 
would all be dead in him and the children in the 
20 299 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


cottages and the farms would fling their laughter at 
him in derision as he went by. 

One hope only he clung to, the thought that there 
still lived in the valley the woman of his ideal, with 
the strength of whose inspiration he yet might cast 
away the spell of these emotions that had fallen 
upon him. 

The faeries indeed had put the stroke of their 
hand upon him and he knew the mark of it would 
be there, in the fear of his eyes and the dejection 
of his heart, for many of the long days that were 
yet to come. But there was nothing, not even in 
the power of their mystic hands, that could take 
from him the ideal he still was clinging to and, step- 
ping silently from the bed where he lay, he crept 
across the floor to the light of his window and looked 
out upon the glory of the rising sun. 

There was the hope for him, a glory of the God in 
Heaven that surely rose day by day to lift up the 
light of the earth. He clasped his hands and almost 
his thoughts became a prayer as he clung to the 
assurance that it brought him. 

It was only because of himself that he had fallen 
into the power of their hands. Now that strength 
had come back to him with the peacefulness of his 
sleep, his emotions no longer beset him and though 
he well knew that in those two years he had achieved 
no mastery over them, there was yet the ideal that 
he had, undimmed before his eyes. 

He permitted the name of Anna Quartermaine 
in a whisper to pass his lips and it brought no 
300 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


shame of the love that he had for her, only the 
shame of his own weakness which in the greatness 
of her heart he knew she would one day forgive. 

So it was, when hope had risen up above the bitter- 
ness of shame and remorse in his heart, he turned 
from the window and set about the gathering to- 
gether of his things, the crucifix on the chimney wall 
and the few things that he treasured, for the journey 
upon the roads that he was going to make that day. 

For some time as he moved about the room, he 
heard only the gentle sounds of her sleeping on the 
bed, the soft and indrawn breath between her parted 
lips. 

Presently, to a noise that he made, she turned and 
sighed like a child in the happiness of its content- 
ment. He crossed to the bed and looked down at 
her, thinking she was to wake and making ready to 
tell her how soon he would be gone. But the depth 
of her sleep was still with her. And then as he 
stood there, his thoughts brought him back to the 
night when first he had seen her face through the 
pane of Malachi’s window, of the way he had asked 
her to unloose the kerchief from her head and how 
she had bid him unfasten the knot himself and how 
he had feared then to touch her. 

Now, was it only curiosity or again the return of 
those emotions that he feared, for the longing came 
over him to untie the knot there as she slept. 

All her hair and the lines of her face were con- 
cealed by the kerchief that bound her head about. 
Her eyes and her lips were the eyes and the lips of 
3 01 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


Anna Quartermaine, and he knew that the likeness 
of them was the spell cast over him in the imagina- 
tion of his mind. 

Would that spell be gone and that likeness vanish 
when once the kerchief was removed? 

With gentle and silent fingers, he softly unfastened 
the knot and laid the ends of the kerchief back upon 
the pillow and there was her hair and all the shape 
of her face as she slept, uncovered for his eyes to 
see. 

He stared and stared again and the cry that came 
up to his lips was never uttered. 

It was Anna Quartermaine ! For not only was the 
likeness complete in every way, beyond all power of 
his imagination, but there in the warm strands of 
her hair was the comb of jade her fingers had for- 
gotten in their speed the night before to take away. 

It was Anna Quartermaine ! And all the ideal he 
had clung to was broken in a thousand pieces at 
his feet. 

“Never to my knowing do the blossoms be part- 
ing from the trees till the seeds be set and the winds 
of God do be scattering them east and west in the 
fruitful corners of the earth.” 

These were the words of Malachi come home to 
him now. The madness of love was a great thing, 
but the thorn trees only blossomed in the want of 
their seed and all the reward that a man might ask 
was the gift of pleasure that nature had to give 
him. 

She had destroyed the ideal that was in him. He 
302 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 

could never believe in life or in love or in himself 
again. 

And then he trembled and swayed from the bal- 
ance of his mind. It was death he saw then — the 
death and the end of all things, and his breath was 
fast between his lips as he sought for the means to 
find it. 

A knife was lying on the table under the window’s 
ledge, the knife he had used for his bread the night 
before. It was this he took in his hand and scarcely 
knew it was there. 

Death he asked for, which the old man in his 
dreams had said was the awakening of life. In the 
madness that had come upon him, he thought that 
no man could do otherwise. 

And so he brought the knife in his hand and 
stood looking at her as she lay asleep on his bed. 
There was no thought of hesitation in his mind. He 
lifted his arm and thanked God as he struck that 
the strength was left in him for the striking. 

She quivered, as the knife quivered in her breast. 
No sound did she make as her eyes opened, and there 
were the countless questions that flew from her eyes 
to his before they closed again and were shut in a 
heavier slumber than that of sleep. 


CHAPTER XXII 


T O my mind, this is where ends the story of 
Anthony Sorel and Anna Quartermaine. 

In such a tale of faerie as this, the ugliness 
of the things that happened after that night of 
Anthony Sorel’s pitiless realization in those Irish 
mountains, has but little place. 

I know and have already told how he carried the 
body of Anna Quartermaine out into the heather 
and laid her there on her last bed with the knife still 
sunken in her breast. I have no doubt there was 
in his mind the last tenderness for her thus. He 
had no wish to hide his deed but would not have 
them find her on the bed he brought her from. 

For none of the essential part of this story I have 
written came to be known at the trial in the court- 
house of the city of Cork. This was the tale and 
its secret that Malachi told me and after he had come 
to the death of Anna Quartermaine, his voice and 
the flow of his words came as it were like a faintly 
trickling stream that has spent itself in flood and has 
but a dim echo of the torrent that it was. 

He spoke again indeed with Anthony Sorel as he 
sat alone waiting for that justice which could 
never judge him, by the lake near the summit of 
Knockshunahallion. But what they said of this 
strange crime of passion, that I shall never know, 
304 


THE PASSIONATE CRIME 


for here it was that Malachi became almost inco- 
herent in his story and the words fell weakly and 
broken from his lips. 

Of the trial itself, which I have read in detail in 
the Cork papers of that day, nothing in keeping with 
this story could be written. Already I have told how 
he kept his silence throughout all the trial. Except 
for those few poignant words : “They are mad who 
look for justice, as those who would hunt for a shil- 
ling under a stone.” 

And that he was hanged for his crime in the jail 
in Cork, you, who have begun this story at its be- 
ginning and followed it patiently until the end, will 
know. 

It has been impossible to re-tell it all in the exact 
words of that old man Malachi, as he told it to me. 
The poetic similes he used, the quaint turns of 
speech, the words that would have been strange to 
so many would have become bewildering in tran- 
scription. 

I have tried, and I fear with but ill success, to 
catch the note of his speech as, hearing one of the 
thousand sounds in Nature, you try to find its corre- 
sponding note upon the strings of some musical in- 
strument. 

If I have succeeded in the ears of some, I shall 
feel I have not tried in vain to make a living thing 
out of this tale of faerie which, to those who never 
heard the secret of it from that old man’s lips, has 
been till now the passionate crime of Anthony Sorel. 


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